Phoenix 101: The Phoenix 40
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: The Phoenix 40

Once upon a time, the Phoenix 40 ran this town, got things done, showed real leadership. The Phoenix 40 was an exclusionary bunch of powerful white men trying to hold onto their power in changing times. The Phoenix 40 was only the tip of an iceberg of evil and corruption that sits deep in the DNA of the city and state. So go the tales, myths and realities long after the legendary group morphed into the benign and toothless Greater Phoenix Leadership.

PulliamThe real Phoenix 40 was formed in 1974 by Arizona Republic publisher Eugene Pulliam (left), lawyer-civic leader Frank Snell and KOOL owner Tom Chauncey. They sent a letter to prospective members and 40 leaders, including Gov. Raul Castro, showed up at the Biltmore for the first meeting in early 1975. The group hoped to focus on transportation, crime and education — crime getting top billing after the murder of a key witness in the land-fraud trial of Ned Warren Sr. The original membership is no secret, not quite 40, and reads like a Who's Who of mid-1970s Phoenix: Clarke Bean, Hayes Caldwell, Chauncey, Msgr. Robert Donohoe, Junius Driggs, Karl Eller, George Getz, Sherman Hazeltine, Robert Johnson, George Leonard, Stephen Levy, James Maher, Richard Mallery, Samuel Mardian, Jr., James Mayer, Rod McMullin, Loyal Meek, Dennis Mitchem, Pat Murphy, Rev. Culver Nelson, William Orr, Jesse Owens, Pulliam, William Reilly Sr., Newton Rosenzweig, Raymond Shaffer, Bill Shover, James Simmons, Paul Singer, Lawson Smith, Snell, Franz Talley, Thomas Tang, Maurice Tanner, Keith Turley, Mason Walsh, Robert Williams and Russell Williams.

And, yes, it's telling that the list didn't include, say, Lincoln Ragsdale or Rosendo Gutierrez. Yet the Phoenix 40 was never as dangerous as its critics feared nor as benign as it claimed to be, but it's an important touchstone in the city's evolution to the current unpleasantness.

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Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Midwesterners

The comments section has been busy with musings about the Midwest migration to Arizona and the degree to which it is to blame for the disaster facing the state and Phoenix. I've offered my assessment in previous posts (it's a great deal to blame).

That doesn't mean every midwesterner is at fault, much less that I hate the Midwest. I spent nearly a decade there, in southwest Ohio, and hold it warmly in my heart. I saw it at its best and lately I've seen it at its worst. But no discussion of Phoenix is complete without assessing this huge tide of immigrants and the things they carried.

The first Anglo settlers of Phoenix were a ragtag group of tough adventurers, everybody from "Lord" Darrell Duppa, namer of Phoenix, who was born in England (maybe France), to the father of Tempe, Charles Trumbull Hayden, a Yankee who had worked the Santa Fe trail. The Mormons settled Mesa.

But Southerners and former Confederates were arguably in the early majority, personified by founder Jack Swilling, CSA. This gave the town a peculiar Southern-Western character that persisted into the early 1960s. My family came from Indian Territory and before that the pre-Civil War Texas frontier. Midwesterners arrived in more numbers with the completion of the Santa Fe Railway and its direct connection from Chicago. Among them was Dwight Bancroft Heard, who bought the Arizona Republican in 1912. He was a major landowner and farmer, and was the driving force behind the region's cotton industry. Along with his wife, Maie Bartlett Heard, he founded the Heard Museum.

Other midwesterners of note: Kansan Eugene C. Pulliam, who built a publishing empire including the renamed Arizona Republic. Lawyer Frank Snell was from Kansas City. (His partner Mark Wilmer, the star litigator who won Arizona v. California before the Supreme Court, came from Wisconsin by way of Texas.)

Another former Chicagoan was Walter Bimson who built Valley National Bank into a powerhouse. Heard, Pulliam, Snell and Bimson were city builders. The latter three, for example, in the late 1940s and 1950s, recruited the high tech industries whose fumes the metro area still runs on. All loved Phoenix. It was their home. In every way they connected the health of the city to that of their companies.

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Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

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.

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Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Power primer

Phoenix has no history. Why are things so screwed up here? It's just like every other place…

Such are some of the statements, whether inane and inaccurate or plaintive, that I often hear from Rogue readers, or just folks down in "the Valley" when I sneak back for a journalist-guerrilla raid. So, a new occasional feature, Phoenix 101, to try to fill in the gaps for a place where even natives my age have never even ridden a city bus, much less know a rich, corrupt and even inspiring history. Let's start with power.

From the era of the Hohokam, power in the Salt River Valley flowed from water. Whoever controlled the water — and how it was used — sat upon the commanding heights of the society. Even today, the divide between Phoenix and the East Valley is partly an echo of the old war between the north and south side of the Salt River over who would get the precious, and fickle, riches of its stream. Even today, the Salt River Project remains, very quietly, the kingdom and the power and the glory.

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