Western economic development into the twenties

Cities in western states are not simply late-starting, warmed-over eastern cities. The recipe that made them is different, and their version of the industrial city reflects a different era. Approaching western states’ economic development is not as straightforward as one might think—especially if one believes there is no such thing as “the West.” The West is no more monolithic than the East. Within the western context are southwest, Pacific, southern California, mountain states and the Central Plains. As we go forward, the reader should be sensitive to the internal diversity within western states. Strategies, tools and programs may carry the same names, but often translate into different things in practice. West of the Mississippi is a fixed geography, but not an analytical classification.

States and their sub-regions displayed their own migration patterns and settlement periods. Migrants quickly discovered that Native Americans had staked a claim several thousand years previously. Spain/Mexico superimposed a “Hispanic” culture and population on much of the West before we got there. Pacific states, especially California, possess a history which goes back to the dawn of the modern era. They border on an ocean, and that ocean has figured prominently in economic development. Mountain states have ranges through which pioneers slogged to get to someplace else. Fear not, the mountains held minerals and timber that attracted prospectors and corporations. For many it was farming, while for others it was cattle/sheep ranching; the Great Plains became the breadbasket of America. When we talk about the West in this period, the raw materials of urban economic bases are varied indeed. The older industrial/manufacturing city, already established in the East, would never exert undisputed control over the economies of western cities.

Lest we be overwhelmed by the West’s vast story, this chapter tackles only three subject areas helpful in understanding the future evolution of economic development in the West. First is the story and dynamics of western city-building. Building upon our earlier Big City city-building, examples of Pacific cities and Denver will further flesh out the internal players; the role of business elites; and the velocity of and process of city-building. In its good time the two ships of economic development will slowly appear and different forms of economic development will be noticed. To help us see the impact of culture on ED/CD the chapter includes a comparison of Yankee/Progressive San Francisco with Privatist Los Angeles. In any case, familiar tools and ED strategies—but especially EDO structures like the chamber, real estate exchanges and port authorities—will fall into place. The cities we concentrate upon in this chapter will become western Big Cities which are by no means clones of their eastern counterparts.

The second theme is the role of the federal government in western urban growth. The feds have their fingerprints all over western urban growth and western economic development strategies. They couldn’t escape being involved—they literally owned and managed most of the West in this period, and still retain considerable acreage as we write. The central role played by the federal government in providing critical ED-related infrastructure is certainly one important discussion, which will allow us to segue into the New Deal in later chapters; but equally important is the ability of local and state governments to piggy-back off federal policies to produce local economic and population growth and to, in effect, form a significant part of the jurisdictional economic base. The federal government played no such role in the formation of the eastern industrial city.

The third theme occupies no fixed location in the chapter, but underlies and drives economic urban growth and economic development throughout this period: the formation of the western regional competitive hierarchy and the continued impact of domestic and immigrant population mobility. We take western population movement as a given when we think of the West, but it is the sine qua non underlying this chapter. It is not our purpose to focus on why those fools did what they did—settle and develop a hostile wilderness and create a civilization—but they did it. I would have been tempted to stay put in Philadelphia! Those that made the trek were usually younger; they certainly were tougher. The emotion behind formation of the eastern competitive hierarchy is mostly lost in history; not so for the West. The fierceness and competitiveness of the new arrivals provide us vivid examples of real-life competitive economic development in action. The settlement of the West is economic development of growth, to be sure; but it is very apparent that first settlement can often mean grow or die. Planned communities will have their place in the West, but not in these years. City-building, or boosterism as it is usually dismissed as being, is more than just tinged with emotion—it is the spirit that formed our cities. Economic development is fortunate to have tapped into that emotion. The politics of ED can be brutal and, like the proverbial sausage-making, not fun to watch—but … !

Our chapter starts when western states were (mostly) US territories, administered by the federal government—by Congress—and by a weak, inefficient, personalistic, patronage-ridden and too often corrupt system of federal bureaucracies. California (1850), Oregon (1859), Kansas (1861), Nevada (1864) and Nebraska (1867) entered as states into the Union around the Civil War. The remaining territorial governments were governed, if that is the correct word, ultimately by Congress itself.¹ Settlement that flowed through this morass was a process that transferred land from federal ownership to private hands. Homesteading, for example, is people-focused economic development. That means railroads were not only EDOs, forming cities, but also CDOs providing people with a new start in life and work. What a revolting thought it must be that community development can be so lucrative and corrupt an endeavor. So let’s turn our attention to western city-building.

“YOU AIN’T IN PHILADELPHIA NOW, DARLING”

The Golden Age of Building Cities

City-building, as demonstrated in Chapter 7—mill/cotton/saw towns, satellite cities and brand new cities such as Miami and Texan cities—was not restricted to western states. Early nineteenth-century Midwest city-building (Chicago aside) is flat out unknown.² Still, the images most associate with pre-1900 city-building are those of the American West. The very first wagon train (three wagons) used the Santa Fe Trail starting in 1822, and the first on the Oregon Trail (ten wagons) left St. Louis in 1830. Likely, the first wagon train to Oregon, using amazingly the Oregon Trail, left Independence Missouri with 70 pioneers in 1841; the grand-daddy of wagon trains (1000 settlers) left Elm Grove Missouri in 1843. In its day, this pre-Civil War migration was labeled “the

Great Emigration.” San Francisco commenced a second phase of city-building with its 1848 Gold Rush and California’s 1850 statehood (mostly by sea). Civil War-era emigration jumped off from Missouri (Kansas City and St. Joseph) into Kansas and Colorado (Denver)—in anticipation of future railroad construction. It declined after the transcontinental railroad’s opening in 1867—why would you go by wagon after that?

Initial city-building population migration can be a relatively low-volume affair. The numbers of people involved in western city growth during this era are not huge. The growth rates are huge, however, and distort our understanding of these early years. Using raw population counts instead of rates, the picture that emerged, with some exceptions, is that pre-1900 western city growth was not explosive. Citing census counts for 1880 and 1900, western cities reveal fairly subdued levels of population growth:

Carson City NV 4229 to 2,100 (oops)

Tulsa OK 0 to 1,390

Oklahoma City 0 to 10,037

Austin TX 11,013 to 22,258

El Paso TX 736 to 15,906

Phoenix AZ 1708 to 5,544

Albuquerque NM 0 to 6,238

Tucson AZ 7007 to 7,531

Boulder CO 3069 to 6,150

Provo UT 3,432 to 618

Wichita KS 4.911 to 24,671

Topeka KS 15,452 to 33,608

San Diego CA 2,637 to 17,700

Tacoma WA 1,098 to 37,714.

In all, 14 cities had a combined population of less than 200,000 in 1900—more than three-fifths of whom resided in Kansas and Texas, the West’s eastern periphery.

But then there was Salt Lake City 20,768 to 53,531; Seattle WA 3533 to 80,671;

Portland OR 17,577 to 90,426; Los Angeles 11,183 to 102,479; Denver 35,629 to 133,859; and San Francisco 233,959 to 342,782. A few cities did capture a lot of migrants in the pre-1900 period.

Real growth in most western cities occurred after 1900. A shared pattern of growth among all the sub-regions of the West, however, is hard to discover. Each city/subregion seems to have beat to its own drummer. The simple timing of population expansion is one example of divergent patterns. Some cities grew most between 1900 and 1910 (Carson City, Salt Lake City, Denver, Seattle), others between 1910 and 1920 (El Paso); most grew very robustly during the roaring twenties. A few even grew during the Depression decade, a rarity (Austin, Phoenix and San Diego).

Denver grew by nearly 60 percent to 213,000 by 1910; San Diego more than doubled by 1910, and then nearly doubled again each decade until the Depression (1930); Albuquerque grew to 26,000 by 1930; Phoenix exploded between 1910 and 1930, but in raw numbers only reached 48,000. El Paso exceeded 102,000 by 1930, but Austin only climbed to 53,000 in that period. Oklahoma City on the other hand grew by 540 percent between 1900 and 1919 (to 64,000) and continued its spurt, reaching over 185,000 by 1930. Tulsa likewise grew significantly each decade from 1390 in 1900 to nearly 142.000 by 1930. Salt Lake City came within a hair of garnering 150,000 residents by 1940; but Provo Utah only attained 14,700 in 1930; and Carson City Nevada, whose population in 1900 was 2100, declined to a bit less than 1600 in 1930. San Francisco on the other hand, with 634,000 residents in 1930, sparkled; and, oh yes, Los Angeles, home to 1.2 million in 1930 and 1.5 million in 1940, overtook San Francisco in 1920 to become the most populous city in the West—and since 1984 the second largest US city.

One feature of early western urbanization that should be noted is its velocity. Velocity led Gunther Barth to develop his “instant city” concept, based on the incredible rates of initial growth that many western cities “enjoyed” (Barth, 1975).³ Barth asserts that some western cities (Denver, Salt Lake City and San Francisco, but also Santa Fe) grew so fast (within two generations) that economic and social-cultural institutionalization was collapsed into a very short time period compared to that experienced by eastern cities. Centuries of development and growth were collapsed into as little as a decade. The strain rapid growth put on institutionalization within these cities, at minimum, overwhelmed any effort, meager though it may have been, toward planning and efficient land usage. Caught up in a brand new boom town, one does not expect to see a great deal of rationality running around. Quick import from key “model cities” led to copying of legislation, law and institutions—of all types.

From 1910 to the present, the West has been the second most urban region (after the Northeast). The West’s post-1900 population was overwhelming urban,⁴ not rural. Contrary to TV, the real Western should have been filmed in a city, not on a ranch. Still, let’s put western expansion into perspective. Chicago’s 1900 population was about 1.7 million; it nearly doubled by 1920. In 1900 more than three of five Americans lived in the North and Midwest—5 percent lived in the West. By 1930 the West doubled its share and remained at 10 percent through 1940. The North actually grew in this period, and the Midwest lost more population than the South (Hobbs and Stoops, 2002, pp. 19–20 Tables 1.7 and 1.8).

Land Speculation and Homesteading: Railroad-Style CD

Privatist land speculation typified a city’s earliest years, and in western states private land speculation followed from how Congress transferred federal land to private ownership: land grants to private individuals and companies. Three forms of land grant were characteristic of western land settlement: (1) homesteading to private individuals (288 million acres); (2) grants to military veterans (61 million acres); and (3) grants to railroad companies (94 million acres).

Despite federal intentions, there was a great deal of speculative acquisition of land. Some homesteaders clearly behaved more like small scale speculators than (yeomen) family farmers … there were also many land companies which controlled sizeable areas … There was also more renting of property than was intended (because) farm creditors foreclosed on unpaid debts. (Ward, 1998, pp. 12–13)

Too many initial homesteaders “flipped” their homestead for a quick profit; thus land sales companies acquired the homesteads. Between railroads and land speculator companies, individuals became marketing targets rather than homebuyers. In many ways, homesteaders were the proverbial razor-blade, not the razor—i.e. homebuyers were where the profits were, and the payback for infrastructure and startup costs.

The 1862 Homestead Act and transcontinental railroad legislation supposedly built upon lessons learned from the 1850s’ settlement of the Illinois Central Railroad (ICRR) experience. The land grant process added hugely to the promotional and advertising whirlwind that followed. Railroad companies followed ICRR’s model with intensive and extensive advertising to promote settlement and traffic. Most prominent among these was the first transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific (UP), with its vast 12-million acre land grant: “By the 1870s it was spending an average of $80,000 per annum on advertising.” In 1874 alone that railroad took space in 2311 newspapers and magazines. In 1882 the Northern Pacific Railroad distributed over 600,000 copies of its publications in English, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Dutch (Ward, 1998, pp. 13–15). Railroads not only provided access; they also delivered future citizens, taxpayers and customers. The exploitive “bribery” long associated with railroad routes to prospective urban centers was simply a cost that had to be paid. Needless to say, the federal monitoring of this process was non-existent—the subsequent Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872 that toppled the Grant administration is testimony to that. This homesteading was a flawed process at best.

Still, that was the post-Civil War environment within which western city-building happened. Railroads developed their own cities—acting as the city-builder: “Cheyenne in Wyoming was a notably successful town promotion by the Union Pacific Railroad. Other railroad towns included Reno, Nevada on the Central Pacific, and Butte, Montana on the Northern Pacific” (Ward, 1998, p. 21). Rivalry among competing railroad companies focused on their people-attraction programs. Southern California was a principal beneficiary of inter-railroad rivalries, as was Kansas (a key hub area). Targeted media placement, low-cost excursion trains, rate subsidization and image/ branding-like strategies were developed for these targeted geographies and groups.

Homesteading and the railroad attraction programs were arguably the most aggressive (and effective) people-attraction initiatives in our history. The Homestead Act ultimately sent 1.6 million households into the West, primarily to Nebraska, South and North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma. They were a critical factor in the Los Angeles speculative land rush that literally put the city on the map. Despite the warm and uplifting tales of Willa Cather, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway play Oklahoma!, the homesteading experience was much like watching sausage being made. The same could be said for western states’ city-building.

To provide some flavor to these dry numbers and comments, brief summaries for Denver, Wichita and Oklahoma State suggest city-building was not a one-size-fits-all process.

Denver

Denver, named after the Kansas territorial governor James W. Denver, was platted (with cottonwood logs) in 1858 by William Larimer. Larimer established a model for city-building which was consciously/unconsciously emulated by subsequent town speculators/city-builders (including Henry Flagler’s Miami). Larimer first built a hotel, founded a newspaper, started up supporting business establishments and created a rough road and grid system. In May 1859 he convinced the few residents of his metropolis to donate 53 lots of land to the Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Express (a wagon Pony Express-like outfit).

Attracting people required accessibility, so linking the platted town-site with the incoming railroad was essential. So in 1861 Latimer convinced Colorado’s first territorial governor, William Gilpin (himself a land speculator), to live in Denver. Until his death in 1894 Gilpin speculated, lured in railroads, wrote promotional books and advertised Denver as the “crossroads of the world” (Mohl, 1985, p. 70). Larimer, in the spirit of Louis XIV, crowed “I am Denver City,” dedicating the rest of his life to Denver’s expansion. From a population of one in 1858, Denver surpassed 35,000 in 1880 and exceeded 105,000 in 1890. It had grown into the largest city between Kansas City and San Francisco.

Denver’s twentieth-century path mirrored the eastern Big City, quickly developing a machine-like and boss-dominated policy system. Robert W. Speer was elected to two terms as mayor (1904–12 and 1916 to his death in 1918). His was a blue-collar constituency rather than ethnic. Speer controlled the fire and police services, and through lax policing allowed “vice” in Denver’s saloons and cultivated their clientele during elections. He developed close relationships with Denver’s business community and “Denver Club”—the polar opposite of Boston’s James Michael Curley. Speer fully embraced the City Beautiful Movement, building a civic center complex, the Denver Zoo and Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He allegedly planted over 110,000 trees in an urban forestry initiative, and paved the streets as well during the City Efficient period.

Wichita

Stephen Ward’s candidate for “the town that boosterism built” was Wichita Kansas. Wichita grew from 50 inhabitants in 1870 to 40,000 by 1888 (Atlanta was 37,000).

Wichita’s Board of Trade produced promotional materials calling it “the new Chicago,” “the peerless princess of the plains,” “the Jerusalem of the West” and, possibly accurately, “the best advertised city in the world”:

Wichita: Metropolis of the South West. The Largest City in Kansas. A city of fine educational institutions, Magnificent Business Blocks, Elegant Residences, and Extensive Manufactures, with more railroads, more Wholesale Trade, more manufacturing, more enterprise than any other city in the South West. (Ward, 1998, p. 22)

The timing of railroad expansion explains a great deal of Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico settlement and sub-regional variation. Kansas City (Missouri) was the jumpingoff point into the West, and Kansas became the beaten path through which wagon trains and rail lines followed. The Kansas Territory was opened for settlement in 1854 and initially river transport was how one traveled. Settlements along the Kansas and Missouri rivers, such as the military base at Leavenworth, attracted more residents by 1860 than Kansas City. Things changed, however.

Chartered in 1859, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (AT&SF), chasing wheat and cattle trade, gradually made its way across southern Kansas. AT&SF did not cross over into Colorado (at Pueblo) until 1873, reaching Albuquerque in 1880. Construction was easy on the flat plains, but sparse population meant few passengers. So, AT&SF established real estate offices early, and aggressively promoted land granted to it by Congress in 1863. Railroad promotion was more dominant than municipal boosterism, and railroads advertised discounted rates as a normal business activity.

Wichita’s population was 689 at its 1870 incorporation (the only woman to sign the Wichita city charter was Mary McCarty—possibly the mother of Billy the Kid).⁵ In 1872 the AT&SF reached Wichita, allegedly “busting the town wide-open.” Real estate land booms, speculation and annexation followed, and by 1890—after Wichita’s greatest population explosion (percentage-wise)—residents numbered nearly 24,000. Second to Wichita was Dodge City (site of the railroad’s repair shop and cattle stockyard). And the pattern was repeated as the railroad extended west—cities were built accordingly.

AT&SF opened up southern Kansas, and Union Pacific did the same for northern Kansas. Cities initially prospered but, as regional competition played out, many eventually lost their location advantage and subsequently declined (Shortridge, 2004). Over the next 150 years the original urban hierarchy shifted dramatically. Little noticed in the sea of Big City research, long-term shifts in Central Plains urban hierarchy could serve as an excellent case study for second- and third-tier western urban ED.

Oklahoma

Oklahoma was not open for settlement until 1889:⁶ on April 22 thousands of young whites gathered at a fence installed by US soldiers at the borders of “Unassigned Lands.”

[a]t noon a cannon boomed and the legal Boomers went rushing across the lines. On foot they came, or on race horses, or driving two wheeled racing sulkies, or farm wagons or high bicycles … [They pounded into the ground] flagged stakes, marking out homesteads or plots in the designated towns … . That morning the Unassigned Lands had an official population of zero; that night it was some 20,000. (Peirce, 1973, p. 250)

On that day Oklahoma City, Guthrie, Norman and Stillwater became cities. This was as unique a form of city-building as could be found in American history.

Newly formed Oklahoma cities seemed especially competitive and growth-oriented. In 1904 one small community (about 5000), determined to rise to civic greatness, organized a promotional campaign by chartering a train for ten days, loading it with 100 citizens, local agricultural products and local entertainment talent, and took off for St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago and Kansas City. One of those on board, economic developer Will Rogers, described the promotion:

Well, it was a joke—a hundred men getting off a train, marching with a band, boosting a place no one had ever heard of. But business men in the places we paraded commenced to realize there must be something in our town or we couldn’t do all this … It was one of the first cases of me and my little rope [rope twirling was his talent] making a public appearance … if you are anxious to know whatever became of this tank town, it’s Tulsa Oklahoma. (Mead, 2014, pp. 164–5)

Tulsa repeated these trips in 1908, 1926 and 1929. Tulsa did grow, but the oil fields surrounding it didn’t do much to stunt its growth. At its peak during the oil boom, Tulsa reached nearly 180,000 before settling down to 140,000 in 1930.

Until Alaska achieved statehood, Oklahoma was home to the largest Native American population. The plight of the Native Americans who either lived in Oklahoma of their own accord or were exiled there (it was the terminus of the Trail of Tears) sadly became an element of our ED history. Decades after the land rush Native Americans lost much of their land, theoretically protected by treaty. Jurisdictions acquired, then sold Native American land as an approved ED initiative. In 1904, for example, the Muskogee Commercial Club acquired Native American land and, with neighboring chambers and commercial clubs, promoted sale of the land. As late as 1912 the same club issued a promotional brochure with the subtitle “the land of the red man calls for the white man’s plow,” and it bragged in Nation’s Business magazine that the program had transferred over 20 million acres of tribal land in eastern Oklahoma (Mead, 2014, p. 164).

The Eastern Hegemony Stretches its Tentacles’

Central place proponents (1950s/1960s) argued and conclusively demonstrated that, given uniform terrain and even distributed natural resources, almost precisely spaced urban centers were dominated by a larger center city (mono-nucleated). Within the metropolitan market area “rings” of cities with specialized smaller markets developed at precise intervals based on market areas for firms. The urban pattern on which central place theorists based their assumptions was an already mature urban landscape that in some form had existed for 100 years or more. As a description of western city-building, however, it delivers little insight into the process of how that precise, rational system came about. Worse, it does not envision the events and change that drastically affected the emerging western urban landscape.

Transportation (and agricultural) innovation in the period was constant, and disruptive. Geographic advantages could prove temporary. Minerals were discovered; and then they played out. Droughts wiped out settlements; territorial legislatures could be bribed and interior cities could become state capitals or be awarded a prized institution such as a prison, county seat or a state college. The army or federal government was always willing to set up a fort or offices/court buildings and supply depots. Railroads built cities as part of their business plan; they also required repair facilities and storage areas en route, setting up secondary and rival cities in the hinterland (Shortridge, 2004, pp. 1–40). Access to rail explains much, but once achieved what explains subsequent growth?

More helpful was the little-known “mercantile model” (Vance Jr., 1970) which, when combined with Frederick Jackson’s Turner’s frontier model, offered insights into the earliest years of western cities. Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” posited a subsistence farming, homestead, economic base from which small merchant towns emerged. Accumulated capital led to further investments sufficient to support a small city: hinterland-based city-building. The crazy quilt, come and go, urban pattern that resulted did not in any way match the image, created 100 years later, by central place advocates. Barth, without intention, described in his Instant Cities how the discovery of gold lured prospectors to San Francisco by the thousands. Entrepreneurial merchants, risk-takers in the extreme (most probably failed), lived off the prospectors; and those that survived accumulated capital and acquired land—both essential for future investment in the city. The Homestead Act brought a different cast of characters into a non-existent community. Brigham Young, when he pitched camp one night in 1847, brought 148 new citizens to Salt Lake City. Five years later Salt Lake City held over 16,000 residents.

Trade was always the dominant consideration for land speculators, agricultural settlers, merchants, army bases and railroads. That’s why port cities were the earliest, and why the latter-period cattle towns—the end to the trail before processing and shipping—had the edge. The story of the West meant cities taking off, encountering competition from rivals and falling behind or beating them. Urban geographic competition was real, constant, and rivalries were bitter and unrestrained. In this world of city-building logistical, non-economic and geographical factors proved much more helpful—and more interesting.

In the mercantile model trade developed around wholesale, not retail. Given access to faraway markets, growth could occur—without it stagnation. Initial capital was supplied by older, east of the Mississippi Big City merchants who sought new markets. They invested in frontier communities of which they (1) become aware and (2) were convinced the community held potential advantages that could result in more sales/ profits. Trade took many forms in these early years, but “points of attachment”— trading centers for eastern goods—on or near transportation routes became necessary once a certain scale was achieved. Towns that convinced eastern merchants they could serve as a point of attachment acquired a branch, distribution center, sales center and eventually perhaps a processing center of some kind. Will Rogers’s Tulsa promotion was not beyond economic and geographical rationality.

In this subtle manner, the North/Midwest hegemony established a more benignly perceived economic colonialist control over the young fledgling cities of the West. Successful cities became “gateways” into a larger hinterland for the company. Further refinements of the mercantile model suggest these young growing cities developed a distinctive regional culture and self-image that emerged from their successful domination over hinterland/regional rivals (Meinig, 1972). City conquest of hinterlands meant not only economic success for its business community; also, more importantly, growth provided the security that the city itself would not be conquered. Boosterism, a derivative of that process and an ED strategy, possessed some depth and a rationale beyond exuberant, unsophisticated, provincial businessmen seeking profits.

Aspiring new cities actively engaged in ED strategies, decisions and initiatives led by their business community that encouraged this process. In a crass sense, the mercantile model provides an understanding of why cities “purchase” access from railroads, and of the boosterism that so dominated the contemporary image of this period. It also, of course, provides a context for understanding the often outrageous forms of attraction and promotion that were also characteristic of the era. It underscores the “growth or die” complex that saturated the western Privatist concepts of urban growth and urban hierarchies. Growth achieved from this city-building was never completely haphazard.

Residents and civic leaders had a vision of the kind of city they wanted to build. This image was drawn from the great metropolises of the East … whose ways, development and culture young settlements hoped to emulate … their deepest urge was to be like the great cities across the nation … This emulation characterized nearly every aspect of development—from the width of the streets, to the fashions of the people who strolled along them. (Wade, 1959, p. 134)

Institutions were copied just like fashions: chambers of commerce were founded, school systems started, the grid system employed, libraries built and street lamps installed as quickly as possible. For us a critical area was municipal law: incorporation (municipal home rule and civic associations), law codes, hybrid EDOs—trips were made regularly back east to acquire copies of legislation, constitutions and judicial decisions. Water works’ independent boards and commissions were established and transportation innovations installed as cities grew to sufficient scale. Describing an earlier period, but carrying over to the West’s golden era of city-building, one can see that western cities evolved as midwestern cities had a half-century earlier. Substitute Chicago or Kansas City for Philadelphia and it works: “Though Western towns drew upon the experience of all the major Atlantic [and Midwestern] cities the special source of municipal wisdom was Philadelphia [and later Chicago].” Having said that: the urban origin of Western town dwellers [and their civic/business leadership] was significant for it meant that the new cities would be built on the image of the older ones … Hence it is not surprising that Western towns bore a physical likeness to Eastern ones … The urge to imitate sprang from deep needs, giving the urban pioneers a lifeline to the past and a vision of grand future. (Wade, 1959, pp. 318–21)

City-Building, City-Builders and Business Elites

“Nature does not make cities,” William Angel writes. “People make them.”

The “taming” of the frontier can be viewed … as the process whereby entrepreneurs developed cities by breaking through the barriers erected by the seemingly impenetrable wilderness … [such] innovation may require the combined efforts of several entrepreneurs. Altering a city’s infrastructure to make it more economically attractive may necessitate community entrepreneurial initiatives. (Angel Jr., 1977, p. 109) Colorful, individual city-building entrepreneurs dominate the city-building saga. But there is more to city-building than the urban entrepreneur.

Successful city-building is not foreordained. Kick-starting a community from scratch, carving it out of the wilderness and convincing other fools that this squalid heaven on earth is the place to live requires motivation, determination and a weird, greedy, opportunistic and narcissistic personality. It is a complex process that can support many conceptual models—and ideological diatribes. Individuals involved in city-building, especially in western cities of this period, are an interesting cast of characters; but, equally important, they are somewhat unique to the post-Civil War corporatist/plantation South and the uprooted New England town characteristic of the Yankee Diaspora. Western city-building is individual city-builders, railroad-corporatist, marketing based—and, above all, speculative.

Entrepreneurial city-builders such as Denver’s Latimer and Gilpin connected the city to the railroad, ensuring survival and future growth. Certainly, every new city had a city-builder, even the ghost towns. We read of the successful ones in our history. Interesting examples of entrepreneurial city-builders can be found in Tacoma Washington (Morton McCarver), Portland Oregon (Henry Corbett), Oakland California (F.M. Smith), San Diego (William Heath Davis) and—one the reader would never usually think of as a Privatist city builder-booster—Brigham Young (Salt Lake City). Citybuilders had their day, but the jurisdictional policy system moved on. Railroad influence over jurisdictions changed its character, and it slowly dissipated once the transportation link was made and the community became established. Local businessmen, the boosters, gradually took over. This is where the chamber comes in.

City-builders created coalitions, and oligarchies developed. Oligarchies institutionalized and became more mass-based: boards of trade and chambers followed and even unions might appear. The business community fragmented along sector lines, each sector establishing an autonomous organizational identity. The economic base could change dramatically and radically, setting in motion an enormous burst of growth. By the time these cities reached the threshold of thinking about becoming Big Cities, they had evolved their own heritage and path.

Involvement of a jurisdiction’s business community was essential to successful city-building. The citizenry has not yet arrived, or has not sunk roots sufficiently to participate meaningfully in policy-making. Businesspeople tied to the community by risk and by profit dominate city-building policy systems. City business elites cooperate, contest and eventually overturn the initial power of railroads/harbor interests—and they institutionalize the entrepreneurial city-builders. Once linked to a railroad, the issue quickly turns to railroad rates and service quality; that dialogue tends toward zero-sum. Entrepreneurial city-builders flame out or pass from the scene. Out-of-town corporate branch managers (mining/extraction industries especially) often will fight, or join forces with the railroads as self-interest dictates. City-building develops into a new, distinctive policy system phase in its life cycle:

As new “upstart” cities appeared in the newly colonized agricultural lands, their priorities were to attract people and investment as rapidly as possible. In its early stages, it was a process driven primarily by land speculation though other concerns gradually became more important, involved the boosters of these upstart places trumpeting their advantages, real and imagined, to any who would listen … As communities became more settled a wider range of more local interests became part of the boosterist ethos, selling their towns to potential settlers and investors. Prominent among such interests were the local newspaper editors who used their columns to proclaim and reinforce a spirit of progress and enterprise. Local businessmen of all kinds vigorously promoted their towns, increasingly through collective bodies such as local Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce and Town Councils. (Ward, 1998, p. 9 and Chap. 2)

Unlike their eastern counterparts, western chambers are not one-percenters or industrialists. Western city-building business elites form around newspapers and regional financial institutions. Downtown “merchants” provide spirit and numerical dominance. There are few (Progressive) professional elites (law, architecture) in the early western city. Homesteading and entrepreneurism in these fledgling, sparsely populated urban centers deprived Progressivism of much of its purpose, and most of its constituency. A weakened Progressive business elite made way for “cowboy Privatism.” Cowboy Privatism was characterized by the politics of closed business elite/sparsely populated urban areas. Maybe I’ve been watching too many John Wayne movies, but in the early New England town the town meeting was in the church; in the West it was more likely to be in the saloon.

Described by Blaine Brownell as a “commercial-civic elite,” by David Goldfield as “progress and tradition” or by Richard M. Bernard as “growth without social change,” the early city-building policy system pursued economic development objectives defined by its business community, supported by a weak, business-dominated political class. There was no such thing as a bureaucracy—unless Wyatt Earp and his brothers can be considered a bureaucracy. Boosterism advocated by these small business elites, if successful, brought in considerable numbers of residents. Certainly, this was ED intended to achieve growth; this business coalition can unashamedly be described as a “growth coalition.”

City-Building: Beyond Boosterism

City-building as a concept operates on two levels: it is a phase of a city’s life cycle (assuming such exists); and it is an ED strategy which includes several sub-strategies, such as attraction (both people and business), institution-building, infrastructure and entrepreneurism, and easily includes the lowest levels of the Maslowian needs hierarchy (law and order, for example) and basic quality of life (a theater). One might be wary of mindlessly conflating the two. How the city-building phase can be anything other than about growth is, to me, inescapable. Growth is not just gross national product (GNP); it is more likely to be a growth in population that is most valued. That economic development would be a highly valued policy area in this phase seems also logical.

If both people and economic growth are implied in the city-building stage, then an entirely new dimension to community development is opened up. Tourism is people attraction, but citizen-attraction is more than that; citizen attraction is a Privatist form of community development that directly taps into our driver of ED, population mobility. In any case, the pace of western urban growth was both uneven (some cities proved to be population magnets, others not so) and temporally unpredictable. The population path was also distinctive. Los Angeles did not attract the same ethnic and cultural groups as did San Francisco, for example. The diffusion of political culture continued patterns first evidenced in the Midwest and South Central city-building phase. The Great Plains states to Denver almost became a population transshipment point.

In any case, a great deal of this chapter’s discussion has focused more on the city-building phase than on the strategy. The strategy exists and operates within the context and environment of the city-building phase. It is evident there are many kinds of city-builders. An Ogden or Larimer can also be a Union Pacific Railroad—or even a land speculation company. We have attempted to demonstrate how the economy of the “little” city can develop into a more conventional market economy—and, in so doing, develop the initial jurisdictional economic base. In the case of western cities that meant inviting the firms and capital of the eastern hegemony to “come on in.” Mining/timber companies didn’t waste any time, and neither did some branch manufacturing. But mostly consumer-driven service/finance firms settled in to milk new markets. As the early city matures a business community forms, establishes key vehicles such as chambers and, if large enough, a real estate exchange or local trade association/ exchange. These groups will inherit dominance from the city-builders and, in the railroad’s case, seek to develop economic autonomy to foster growth and profits. That this business ED involvement, cowboy Privatism, has been collapsed into a simple and mindless, local hick, greed-based boosterism is unfortunate.

Western city-building overlapped with “New South” city-building; but, as described in the last chapter, the latter is not identical to western city-building. The South had an existing workforce, raw materials and plenty of new markets to exploit. The railroads gave it first priority, and manufacturing firms of hegemonic Big Cities knew opportunity when they saw it. They would see it in Los Angeles to be sure; but, Pacific cities aside, manufacturing dispersion was markedly less in western cities. Texas, dancing to its own more isolated and autonomous geography, evolved more on its own terms. In the South the divided Redeemer policy system and the distinctive political culture, plus being home to 95 percent of African-Americans, created a distinctly different setting than anything found in the Wild West. If anything, the South lost population—the West was “undividedly” in growth mode.

BABY BIG CITIES OF THE PACIFIC: SAN FRANCISCO, PORTLAND, SEATTLE, LOS ANGELES

San Francisco

Our history centers on why San Francisco competed not only with its southern California neighbor, Los Angeles, but also with Oakland, Portland and Seattle. Essentially,  our  focus  ties  to  better  understanding  how  intra-regional  competition among the Pacific Coast’s regional urban hierarchy is affected by our dynamics of ED (population mobility, jurisdictional economic base and political culture).

San Francisco (founded in 1776) was a sleepy enclave of about 500 in 1846 until spurred by the 1848 Gold Rush. It was the only viable seaport and commercial trade center on the Pacific Coast. San Francisco thus functioned as a transshipment point (gold/commodities processing its principal export/service), and marine trade flourished between the East Coast, Mexico/Latin America, Hawaii and the Far East (navy Commodore Matthew Perry opened up Japan in 1854). San Francisco, literally the only “port,” established itself as the financial center of the West Coast. Wells Fargo Bank was founded in 1854. After statehood (1850), the city developed the institutions associated with contemporary politics, commerce and finance. A chamber and several merchant exchanges sprang up, and cultural institutions also flourished.

San Francisco’s chief city-builder was William Ralston, president of the Bank of California, whose fortune accrued from Nevada’s Comstock silver mines. Other early city leaders included Levi Strauss and Domingo Ghirardelli (Ghirardelli Chocolate Company). But the ED engine of early San Francisco was its port facilities. Business firms that controlled the operating facilities realized they needed public services (dredging, lighthouses and wharves/piers) to keep ports open and ensure dependable profits. So, in 1851 the first American “port authority” was created: Governor Leland Stanford signed legislation creating a formal “Board of State Harbor Commissioners for San Francisco” (later renamed San Francisco Port Authority) “to construct wharves at the ends of all streets commencing with the Bay of San Francisco.”

Through its debt commission, the San Francisco authority leased wharf space for periods of up to ten years. The state port authority (governed by local business) operated these facilities until 1969 when they were merged with the City/County of San Francisco (California Burton Act). State management of San Francisco’s harbor was patchy and scandal-prone. Facilities were chronically underinvested—frequently unable to compete with other Pacific ports in attracting trade. Seeing opportunity, in 1926 Oakland established its port and, for years, lived off trade seeking to avoid San Francisco’s facilities.⁷

San Francisco’s fragmented business community imagined their city as the natural leader of the West. In these early years San Francisco adopted same Big City style as eastern Big Cities—mayor-businessmen and chamber–merchant exchange—and professional elites economic/political leadership prospered. This business community was well established previous to the railroad’s arrival, but marine/harbor-based business elites, operating through the Port and the Marine Exchange, were a separate force from the downtown business community. The San Francisco’s business community differed, in one respect, from its eastern counterparts—there were few manufacturers, and, aside from shipping and marine elites, merchants, real estate and finance dominated. Even in these early years trade and the service sector, not manufacturing, drove San Francisco’s growth and was the chief element in its business community.

With an early head start San Francisco established commercial primacy over California and the West Coast. The transcontinental railroad (the Overland Route) opened in May 1869. That arrival was a mixed blessing in that while benefiting San Francisco, it also spurred construction of regional railroads into the hinterland. In fairly short order that leveled the playing field for Pacific cities by linking them to each other and to points east. Nevertheless initially San Francisco expanded greatly (by 1880 it was the nation’s ninth largest city). By the turn of the century, however, its growth rate moderated considerably. It was no longer the “only Pacific port” in a storm, so to speak.

San Francisco never was demographically homogeneous. A magnet for fortuneseekers of all sorts, the city attracted a diverse citizenry from the beginning, and that diversity persisted into the twentieth century. Like its northeastern/mid-Atlantic Big City counterparts, San Francisco attracted foreign immigration—notably from China (Asians comprise about 5 percent of the city’s population), and by 1869 Chinatown formed into a neighborhood. As of 1900, 30 percent of the city’s population was foreign born, and an additional 40 percent were second-generation foreign immigrants (in descending order Irish, German, English, Italian and Jewish). Less than 0.5 percent were African-American.

In the suitcases of ethnic migrants were two items that affected future San Francisco public policy and economic development: first, a desire to live together and form ethnic neighborhoods; and, second, a propensity to join unions. Ethnic neighborhoods (Mission Hills, for example) developed throughout the city, and the upper classes retreated to places like Nob Hill and Pacific Heights. San Francisco became one of the most unionized cities in the United States, and labor-management issues soon polarized the local economy and San Francisco politics. The election of the famous Abe Ruef–Eugene Schmitz machine in 1902 was a polarizing dynamic. The machine, composed of ethnic voters, centered on the Union-Labor Party which controlled municipal politics through 1909.

Oakland prospered from this turmoil in the sense that geographically it captured San Francisco’s departing middle class. Suburban-like in its initial settlement, Oakland offered affluent housing and neighborhoods, and quickly acquired an industrial base (canneries, breweries). Oakland aggressively annexed its peripheries (1897-1910), set up its own streetcar system—and invested in port facilities. By 1910 Oakland had captured about 30 percent of the freight tonnage passing through the Golden Gate (Blackford, 1993, p. 16). After its earthquake/fire (1906) many firms relocated from San Francisco. San Francisco by the end of the twentieth century’s first decade faced a home-grown urban competitor in its immediate back yard.

San Francisco stumbles on the City Beautiful walkway

San Francisco is the West’s best candidate for inclusion as a Big City. The San Francisco Merchants Exchange, originally formed in 1866 by 47 bankers and merchants, became the city’s leading EDO. Within four years it had enlisted over 1000 members; its projects included street cleaning, lighting and paving, a new public market area and enhanced fire protection. Its agenda mirrored Big City agendas back east. Responsible for municipal water supply infrastructure was the Real Estate Dealers’ Association/Exchange (1897): 30 business-led, neighborhood improvement associations led the crusade to improve streets, public buildings, sewers and the water supply (Blackford, 1993, p. 33). Physical upgrading and redevelopment was thought essential for business prosperity—and San Francisco would not be left behind when the Planning Movement and City Beautiful became economic development’s “latest and greatest.”

The leader of the turn-of-the-century movement was James D. Phelan, a San Francisco-born son of a “Forty-Niner” who made his fortune in real estate, trade and banking. As Vice-President of California’s World’s Fair Commission, he managed the state’s exhibit in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He returned determined to bring about similar redevelopment in San Francisco. He got elected mayor and served for three terms, until 1901. In 1898 Phelan obtained approval for a new municipal charter establishing at-large elections and providing authority for municipal ownership of water and other utilities. Phelan was San Francisco’s version of a Great Lakes social reform mayor.

True to form Phelan pressed hard for both infrastructure and neighborhood programs. The essential tool required was issuance of municipal bonds, which required a referendum. He sought bonding authority to finance a hospital, sewers, schools, streets, a library, a jail and playground/parks improvements; also an opera house civic auditorium, a music conservatory, flower/tree-planting, prohibition of overhead trolley car wires and construction of harbor improvements. The basis for all this stuff, of course, was the comprehensive plan which would “elevate the public taste” and serve as a “great advertisement for our city” (Blackford, 1993, pp. 40–41). Phelan had the support of the Merchants’ Association and the Public Improvement Central Club (created by the 30 neighborhood improvement clubs). Their objective was to bring the City Beautiful movement to San Francisco.

Despite pushing hard for several years to issue bonds, Phelan was unable to secure bond financing. Trouble appeared from the Real Estate Exchange which believed bonds would increase taxes. So City Beautiful bond issues were voided on technicalities and, when reapproved in 1904, no banker was willing to buy them. So a “meeting of about twenty gentlemen” set up the Association for the Improvement and the Adornment of San Francisco. The AIASF was Progressivism personified; within a year its membership climbed to nearly 400:

The main objectives of AIASF are to promote … beautifying of streets, public buildings, parks, squares, and places of San Francisco; to bring to the attention … [to] the best methods for instituting artistic municipal improvements; to stimulate the sentiment of civic pride in the improvement and care of private property; to suggest quasi-public enterprises [utilities], and in short, make San Francisco a more agreeable city in which to live. (Blackford, 1993, p. 40)

The AIASF, composed of bankers and the Merchants’ Association, convinced local banks to purchase City Beautiful bonds. Their immediate agenda were civic improvements such as an opera house, civic auditorium, music conservatory, street/boulevard improvements, parks—and a comprehensive plan for San Francisco.

In 1904 Phelan, as President of the AIASF, had extended an offer to prepare the plan to our old friend Daniel Burnham (see Chapter 6). The AIASF, streetcar companies and railroads would foot the bill. Burnham, completing his Washington DC plan, was mid-stream in Cleveland’s City Beautiful initiatives, but accepted nevertheless. He and his assistant, Edward Bennett (who shortly after designed Portland’s comprehensive plan), came to San Francisco. Burnham and Bennett worked off and on through 1905 to write up the plan, completing it in late 1905.

Burnham’s plan proposed a series of concentric circles—with each circle playing a special role in the city’s social and economic life. A civic center was included. Wide concentric streets, with arterials slicing diagonally, the plan radically reconfigured San Francisco’s existing pattern.

At 5:14 a.m. on April 18, 1906 an earthquake lasting less than a minute leveled buildings and ruptured gas pipes and water mains. Fires spread throughout the city, burning for three days and destroying much of San Francisco: almost five square miles encompassing the financial district, the major retail district, much of the wholesale, factor and entertainment sections of the city … Burning an area one and one-half times as large as the great Chicago fire of 1871 … Between 500 and 3,000 people died, and another 250,000, about three-fifths of the population were left homeless. (Blackford, 1993, p. 32)

“Damn the earthquake and machine; full speed ahead”

The almost total destruction of the past’s built environment created an opportunity for the plan’s speedy approval and implementation. To the surprise of Burnham/the AIASF the plan went nowhere. The city was eventually rebuilt with little correspondence to the outlines or principles of Burnham’s plan. Why?

City Beautiful, however, had triggered an eruption from the unions (teamsters and waterfront) and ethnic voters, who viewed its initiatives as serving the interests of affluent business elites. A two-month strike ensued, forcing Phelan to intervene—and costing him the next election. That election brought to power the Union-Labor Party, headed by Eugene Schmitz. From then on, behind the scenes, Abe “Boss” Ruef ran city politics. San Francisco enjoyed machine government for the better part of a decade to follow. City Beautiful seemed stillborn.

Relations between the machine and AIASF deteriorated further. Business elites, the core of the AIASF, sparked investigations that led to indictments/trials which threatened to end the machine and throw its bosses into jail. Suffice it to say, trust on both sides was lacking—and the plan/funding went nowhere fast. A committee was formed to review the plan and make recommendations. The review process extended for some time and broke down:

Street construction proved to be a particularly contentious issue, for until the locations of streets were fixed and the streets rebuilt, businesses could not fully resume operations. Merchants and other businessmen who had long supported planning now broke from it in the interest of getting back in business as soon as possible. Another divisive matter was the proposed extension of new strict ordinances governing the building of fireproof structures … to make San Francisco more secure against future blazes. The attempt led to vociferous opposition from small business owners … as too expensive. (Blackford, 1993, p. 49)

The Merchants’ Exchange had second thoughts if the plan could not be rapidly implemented. Time was money.

A third issue, building the civic center, proved contentious. Some businessmen thought it too expensive; San Francisco could not afford such a luxury—the city had burned down after all. This tapped an underlying fear of all business owners that Burnham’s plan would play havoc with the city’s tax base, resulting in huge tax increases. Those opposed to the plan continued to see it as serving business and upper-class tastes while doing nothing concrete to address the needs of non-elites: affordable housing, for example, was totally left out of the plan. The San Francisco Chronicle expressed it best:

Every individual in the city is practicing economy. So must the City itself … There must be the strictest economy in government. We all desire the city beautiful just as we desire the home beautiful, but the business man who at this juncture should attempt to borrow money to decorate his home would knock in vain on the doors of any bank in America. (Blackford, 1993, pp. 49–50)

The City Beautiful had run into the crosshairs of the City Practical.

The trials of Schmitz and Ruef drew blood; both would go to jail. But, in their wake, the city’s business leaders were hopelessly divided and conflicted. Construction and rebuilding commenced without plan approval and seldom came close to following the plan. Many in the business community, however, believed for a decade following City Beautiful that physical improvements, and beautification in general, were essential to “the commercial supremacy [of San Francisco] on the Pacific Coast.” The divisions among business and the gulf between the business community, the unions and ethnic workers lingered on for decades after—getting something done in San Francisco was going to be difficult indeed.

To facilitate business support for the City Beautiful, the San Francisco Chamber merged with the Merchants’ Exchange and Downtown Association (1912–13). The goal was to secure public approval of municipal bonds for desired infrastructure and the Burnham-proposed civic center (city hall, auditorium and library). The civic center was defended as a link between art and commerce without which San Francisco would not be considered as a “great city” to outsiders, and unlikely able to compete in attracting external investment. The civic center was likened to Pericles’ Athenian Parthenon, which, no doubt, increased its attractiveness to ethnic voters (sarcasm again). Anyway, the chamber president stressed that “We’d better … take a few lessons in civic pride and patriotism from our sister cities on the coast, and get busy” to install infrastructure (Blackford, 1993, p. 57). The campaign finally worked; bonds were approved and construction began two years later.

San Francisco then focused on its 1915 World’s Fair—the Panama–Pacific International Exposition (PPIE)—to demonstrate that the city had indeed overcome the devastating earthquake and to assert regional leadership over its coastal competitors. Four years later the city held the Balboa Exposition to follow up on the 1915 World’s Fair success. Public improvements again became the targeted focus. By this time, the machine had been ousted and business leadership once again had returned to City Hall. Civic improvement associations formed to support and create “a new, clean city. Business prosperity, industrial peace, and increased commerce.” According to the Vice-President of the chamber, the critical infrastructure after the civic center success was to “call the attention of the world to this powerful western empire and its chief city and glorious harbor” (Blackford, 1993, pp. 59, 61). Discussion of the harbor will be picked up later in the chapter.

The Pacific Northwest

The 1890 populations of Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland and Seattle ranged between 43,000 and 50,000 (San Francisco about 300,000). But over the next decade Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles each more than doubled again. San Francisco’s growth over the 20 years was a more muted 39 percent. A new Pacific Coast urban hierarchy emerged.

Portland developed first. Founded of sorts in the early 1840s–1850s, Portland possessed river access (Columbia and Willamette) to its hinterland and man-made access (port facilities) to the Pacific. The Willamette Valley produced abundant agricultural exports, and lumber from the inland forests provided opportunities for Portland’s business community to flourish. Railroad access, when it arrived in the 1870s and 1880s, allowed Portland merchants to reach deep into western Idaho/ Montana and eastern Washington—a market of nearly a half million by 1910. Trade attracted local furniture production and canning and flour mills to process raw products into finished exports. Portland enjoyed a real estate boom between 1904 and 1909.

Seattle got off to slower start. Possessing an excellent natural harbor but lying on the nation’s border, it was the terminus of the nation’s transportation system. That put a strain on Seattle’s early growth. Fewer than 4000 lived there in 1880, which makes Seattle’s meteoric growth between 1890 and 1910 all the more remarkable. Again, rail access to the interior was the reason. Lumber (Weyerhaeuser), a rich agricultural hinterland and coastal/foreign trade fostered home-brewed ship-building and salmonfishing sectors.

Both Seattle and Portland grew by tapping into hinterlands—trade which had formerly made its way to San Francisco. By 1910, with San Francisco politically divided and recovering from the earthquake, it faced competition from rapidly growing northwestern rivals. Looming in the background was Panama Canal construction which promised to open up the Pacific to East Coast trade. In this context, ports (port authorities) seemed the vehicle to generate city growth through regional competition. Washington and Oregon wasted little time setting up state-wide systems of municipal port authorities. Similar to San Francisco, Portland’s more contentious politics, however, provided an opening for Seattle, with its excellent natural harbor, to seize leadership in foreign trade.

THE “PROGRESSIVE” PORT AUTHORITY

In 1909 the Oregon legislature approved a series of Progressive reforms intended to break the hold of railroad interests, not only on Portland but also on the entire state. The reforms—Chapter 777 (state) and Chapter 778 (Portland)—set up a process by which Oregon municipalities could create their own “London-style” port authority (with locally elected governance). Oregon’s coastal communities approved a series of local port authorities: Coos Bay (1909), Siuslaw Oregon (1909) and Astoria Oregon (1910). Others followed, and authorization was later extended to communities along

Oregon’s major river waterways. (As of 2015, the Oregon Public Ports Association claimed 23 public port authorities operated in Oregon, making port authorities a major element of the current state ED system.) The old-style Port of Portland had been created in 1891, and it quickly became mired in a constant series of scandals (which persisted through the first 50 years of its existence). By the turn of the century, however, voters and the business community believed the marine business that dominated the port were crippling the competitive position of the city. So in 1910 voters approved $500,000 to acquire the land for piers and docks for a second port authority. The machine mayor vetoed the council legislation to sell the bonds, and irate voters then used the Progressive initiative to approve $2.5 million for an independent Commission of Public Docks—breaking the business monopoly in the original port. The two port authorities coexisted, uneasily, until consolidated in 1970.

In the state of Washington, the story was much the same. The struggle between Progressives and private interests focused on public ownership of port-related facilities: “In Seattle, Tacoma and elsewhere railroad companies had long controlled much of the urban waterfront as a result of concessions granted as cities competed to become railroad destinations.”⁸ As early as 1907 the governor vetoed port authority legislation, and attempts in 1909 were rebuffed as well. Every dog has his day, however, and in 1911 a series of Progressive reforms were approved by the state legislature; included among them was the Port District Act.

The Port District Act, signed by Governor Hay, empowered municipalities to create port authorities and directly elect their commissioners: “Progressives argued that public control (of harbor access and facilities) would permit coordinated development, financed by government-backed credit, and would ensure standardized rates and equal access to port facilities.”⁹ Specifically, port districts were authorized to acquire, construct, lease and operate waterways; docks, wharves and other harbor improvements; rail and water transfer and terminal facilities; and ferry systems. They were empowered to tax (with voter approval), issue bonds and exercise eminent domain. Three commissioners of each port authority were elected; the port authority would be independent of other governmental jurisdictions.

Similar to Oregon, “only more so,” the Washington State Port Authority evolved to be the single most significant element of the state’s current economic development effort. In 2015 there were 95 operating port authorities in Washington—more than any other state.¹⁰ Washington’s two largest ports, Seattle and Tacoma, are held to be the largest ports in the world with directly elected port authority commissioners. Post-1940 state legislation further empowered Washington State port authorities to create industrial development districts, develop industrial sites with access to rail and attract private industries. Subsequent legislation authorized airports and airport-related activities.

LOS ANGELES

Los Angeles dates from the seventeenth century. Its 1900 population slightly exceeded 100,000, the 36th largest in the nation. Yet as late as 1870 fewer than 5800 lived within its borders. LA itself was a Privatist growth machine that spun off a series of interrelated yet autonomous cities, counties and unincorporated areas—“a multi-headed beast with no center” (Fulton, 2001). Los Angeles was characterized by a poorly demarcated downtown; a series of waterfront centers spread the length and the breadth of the city itself; and a plethora of main streets with commercial strips behind which were sprawling residential neighborhoods. The metropolitan area stretched over several counties, 100 miles along the coast and 100 miles deep into California’s interior—with more autonomous jurisdictional policy systems than could ever be imagined. Sprawl does not begin to describe it.

The metropolitan economy became home to a host of host of emerging gazelles: technology, oil, Hollywood/entertainment, tourism, aerospace, agriculture, international trade and business services; and a robust construction/home-building/finance sector that consumed ever more land to provide homes, shops and jobs for a seemingly endless stream of in-migrants and immigrants. An oil boom, a southern California affair, by 1914 moved California into first place among the oil-producing states of America. LA was “cluster” heaven as well:

The result was a decentralized settlement pattern quite different from the industrial cities in the East and Midwest … metropolitan Los Angeles did not grow by radiating from a single center. It appeared when many different centers blurred together … [Huntington’s streetcar system] a backbone [that] made sprawl permanent by facilitating long-distance commuting. Soon the automobile began to fill in the gaps. (Fulton, 2001, pp. 8–9)

Fulton conceived as Los Angeles as “the anti-city.” How did this so-called anti-city get built? What role did economic development play?

As a starting point Los Angeles enjoyed few, if any, natural advantages. To David Clark there was never any economic or geo-political reason for Los Angeles to exist. The geography it occupied was surrounded by desert and mountains; it had no access to natural resources relevant to the industries that eventually located there, no water and, in the beginning, virtually no people. A no-man’s land between different cultures and ethnic groups, LA didn’t possess a natural harbor with access to the Pacific: “Not only is Southern California an island, it is a desert island … . Through a combination of advertising and engineering, Los Angeles created the conditions that nature did not provide” (Clark, 1983, p. 283).

Los Angeles was alleged to be new kind of city: a post-industrial city with a new economy, politics and society whose development started when the eastern industrial city was entering its golden years: “Los Angeles brought in the money necessary for an expanding economy, not through exporting goods but by drawing in people. The migrants did not come just for factory jobs, of which the city had few to offer, but in the pursuit of hopes and dreams.” Once there, the jobs came: “Los Angeles became the nation’s dream spinner and faith healer: the city of the Second Chance (Clark, 1983, p. 269). In some ways Los Angeles was an ED pyramid scheme based upon attracting people, which attracted money and firms. To attract migrants meant infrastructure, and hustling jobs from new industries and sectors that had never existed previously. If there is any city that “economic development built,” Los Angeles was it. Los Angeles, the un-immaculate conception, created itself—as opposed to San Francisco, the offspring of location and monopolistic starting advantage.

Los Angeles had many city-builders: Huntington, Wiggins, Mulholland and Harry Chandler (McWilliams, 1946) were the tip of a small “cartel of powerful interests that drew from the area’s distinctive political culture of Midwestern Privatist immigrants [that produced] the most effective growth machine ever created” (Fulton, 2001, p. 7). No one city-building could ever construct this rapidly sprawling, uncontrollable physical mass. It took an oligarchy to build it and to manage its infrastructure: water, housing, transportation—and attraction. With so many city-builders simultaneously wreaking their havoc on that arid land, it was useful for this oligarchy to find a place, a structure, to come together to amass and package their individual power and resources. That structure, LA’s principal EDO in the city-building era, was the chamber of commerce. In an age when chambers were full of one-percenters, this was not unique. What was different was that the oligopoly used the chamber not to accommodate growth, but to foster it. LA’s early chamber anticipated the Houston’s 8F elite and Dallas’s Citizen’s Council by nearly 50 years.

The City that ED Built

Founded in 1781, it was an 1887 Santa Fe Railroad speculative bubble—“setting a standard for flimflam” never again equaled— that launched LA into history. The LA real estate speculative boom was made possible in a city of only 6000 by a $600,000 “subsidy” paid to attract the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876. After that “Some promoters attached oranges to Joshua trees,”¹¹ banks lent money and developers laid out 500,000 lots of land. A second line—the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe—opened in 1883, by which time the population had increased to about 11,000. In 1887 it cost only $1 to travel from the Mississippi Valley to LA: “To increase traffic the railroads sought to attract settlers and mounted a national advertising campaign that pictured Southern California as the Garden of Eden. Rate wars meant that cheap overland transportation was available” (Blackford, 1993, p. 18).

The advertising schemes worked—the city grew by 500 percent in less than one year, to over 50,000. But within months the bubble burst. Someone had to pick up the pieces.

At a meeting of business leaders on 15 October 1888, Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the Los Angeles Times, spearheaded the creation of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which embarked on a course of continuous promotion, distributing two million pieces of literature within the next three years. From this time forward, Los Angeles advertised itself relentlessly as the golden land of promise and hope. (Clark, 1983, pp. 270–71)

Population growth preceded economic expansion. People created jobs.

The ED strategy was to have an EDO that could get the collateral material out, but also with imagination to do the unthinkable, the audacity to create the bizarre and the sales/charisma to attract staff and business investment. That man was Frank Wiggins— first as promotion director, then chamber CEO. Wiggins believed that oranges personified sun, hope and a land of plenty. He took a bunch of Californian orange growers to the St. Louis World’s Fair and set up an exhibit. He followed up with three orange exhibits at the Chicago World’s Fair (he brought with him 375,000 oranges). To grow so many oranges Wiggins organized an orange-growers’ cooperative (Sunkist) and started shipping oranges across the nation with scenic covers on the crates. His tourism program was incredibly successful.

At the 1893 World’s Fair he constructed a giant elephant made of walnuts and brought it back for permanent exhibit in Los Angeles: “At the same permanent exhibit, visited by 185,000 people annually … was a giant tower of ears of corn, shaped into a giant ear [of corn presumably], and a statue of a huge bottle of wine, made up of many smaller bottles” (Mead, 2014, pp. 168–9). Diversifying his hoopla, the chamber targeted the new aircraft sector, then the automobile—Wiggins strongly pressed LA transportation officials to build more roads fast.

In 1907 a movie entrepreneur, William Selig, got a brochure in the mail from Wiggins. The brochure promised 350 days of sun in Los Angeles. At the time Selig was mad because of recent bad weather in Chicago, so he sent a crew to LA to film: “Others quickly followed him with the chamber doing all it could to attract them. By 1915 the Chamber was bragging that 80 percent of the nation’s movies were made in LA.” Hollywood—a small community in 1870, incorporated in 1903 and annexed in 1910—was the creation of H.J. Whitley, president of the Los Pacific Boulevard and Development Company. Its 1910 annexation was facilitated by the odd fact that Hollywood zoning did not permit a movie theater within city limits—but LA did. D.W. Griffith was the first to produce a movie in Hollywood, a 17-minute affair called In Old California (1910). The first film made in Hollywood by a Hollywood studio was filmed in Whitley’s living room in 1911. By 1920 four major film companies—Paramount, RKO, Warner and Columbia—had set up studios in Hollywood. The initial “Hollywood” sign on the hill went up in 1923. Whoever said collateral mailings are worthless?

When he died in 1924 Wiggins had worked for the chamber for 35 years; it had 7500 members. LA during his career grew from 50,000 to 576,000 and, five years after his death, to 1.2 million. Life magazine described Wiggins as “the greatest city booster that ever lived” (Mead, 2014, pp. 169–70).

Los Angeles Infrastructure

Orange juice needs water—and so do hordes of new residents. The man who delivered it, the villain of the Chinatown movie, was LA’s chief engineer, William Mulholland. Born in 1877 Ireland, Mulholland, as head of LA’s water department, fabricated a plan to get water by aqueducts from the Owens River at the base of the Sierra Mountains 223 miles away. He annexed the San Fernando Valley to do it, but by 1920 he provided whatever water LA needed to meet its growth needs. In so doing, of course, he triggered the infamous California Water Wars. The collapse of a dam in 1928, however, resulted in the deaths of 64 workers and destroyed several small cities. That ended his career.

It was not the automobile that got Los Angeles residents around in the early years. Rather, it was arguably the best transportation system of its time, the (yellow and red) trolley/streetcar Pacific Electric Railway. Advertising that one could “live in the country and work in the city,” the Pacific Electric connected the 42 jurisdictions that comprised LA metro—facilitating the now-famous sprawled LA area. The railway went 35 miles out; LA was reputed in 1910 to be the nation’s largest inter-urban transportation network, stretching 1300 miles with 20 separate lines. The Pacific Electric was owned and managed by Henry Huntington, a New York-born railroad magnate. As streetcar owners were wont to do, numerous real estate projects, subdivisions and neighborhoods were financed and built along his lines. Huntington was a Wiggins’s supporter and a “booster extraordinaire.”

Having said all this, LA became known as the city constructed for the automobile. In 1920 the city (which had acquired the Pacific Electric) paved it over with a road system: “By 1930, Los Angeles County contained more cars per resident than any other community in the world” (Clark, 1983, p. 272).

Said and done, the most essential infrastructure required to achieve growth was people. It was the kind of people attracted to LA that made this all work. The residents and its culture were anti-urban—a central city with a suburban mentality and culture. Its annexation-enhanced boundaries included numerous semi-autonomous residential areas. With an “inborn mistrust of big government, and especially of political machines,” the region in which the city lay was “a plethora of small, self-governing cities … [with] government close to the people as the norm” (Fulton, 2001, p. 13). Unlike its northern neighbor, San Francisco, Los Angeles did not attract anywhere near the number of foreign-born or second-generation immigrants. It did not form ethnic neighborhoods to the same degree. There were lots of immigrants from Mexico, Latin America and Asia, and some from southern and Eastern Europe. But by 1910 only 4 percent were non-white and 19 percent foreign-born. LA did house ethnic minorities, but they did not dominate the regional culture—instead they existed within it, often uncomfortably. Labor-management conflict was brutal and longstanding; but a monolithic business community, led by the Los Angeles Times, made union victories rare.

Most of the early LA population was multi-generation American, formerly resident in (Midwest and Great Plains) small towns and farms. They had come to LA to retire or for health reasons: the climate was thought to be a cure for several serious diseases such as tuberculosis (TB), and considered “a veritable sanatorium” (Blackford, 1993, p. 18). These residents did not need factory jobs—or indeed any job. By 1921, 21 percent of LA’s population was older than 55 (compared to 14–17 percent in eastern cities). The Great Migration’s first phase added a considerable number of white southerners to this mix. The political culture that followed from this was not that of San Francisco, Oakland, Portland or Seattle. Los Angeles in this era was a Midwestern,

Prohibition-leaning and Bible-touting city—pretty much anti-union, and very much Republican. In 1920 Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, the first evangelist to use the radio, founded the first religious radio station in the nation from Los Angeles.

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Western Infrastructure

Why mince words. Most of the West was literally owned and managed by federal bureaucracies, i.e. the federal government. Whatever history and tradition characterized economic development east of the Mississippi, it was likely to be a quite different story in the West for that reason alone. The federal role started during the nineteenth century.

The 1891 Forest Reserve Act/Land Revision Act authorized the President (Benjamin Harrison) to set aside and reserve land and forest areas from the public domain. Added to by both the Cleveland and McKinley administrations, the land/forest aggregation was turned over to the newly formed (1905) Forest Service, the creation of Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt. By the 1990s over 740 million acres—one-third of the nation—was still directly administered by the federal government. The feds were many western states’ largest landowner, and they controlled economic recreational/ tourist activities conducted on these lands.

In 1919 the National Park Organic Service Act established a nationwide set of national parks, and, intentionally or not, put Uncle Sam into the local/regional tourism business. Federal ownership of so much land and the involvement of the federal government in regulating/conducting what, in other states, would be local/state economic development activities/business climate created a complexity, if not a constant source of tension in western state economic development. This tension did not take long to manifest itself. In 1922, after leasing federal petroleum reserves to a private firm, a massive scandal, the Teapot Dome, erupted. The tension persists and will be discussed in Chapter 19; but suffice it to say, the federal government will be an EDO as far as western tourism goes.

As a starting point in regard to the federal role in western economic development, I make three observations:

1. The West as described by its famous explorer, John Wesley Powell, is “an arid region”;
2. Anyone who has survived a car trip across the West will know—it is BIG. Getting from place to place and providing services over such a dispersed, loosely populated area is a different matter; and
3. The Pacific Ocean required the federal government to construct a defense/military presence in the Pacific coastal states.

These observations require certain infrastructures that will be discussed in this section: water, energy and highways. First and foremost, the federal government had to deliver infrastructure if the West was ever to develop. Several of these infrastructures will be discussed, albeit briefly, in Chapter 13. This brief entry into the world of federal infrastructure in western states mostly provides a time line for critical infrastructure developed in these years by the federal government. Frank Wiggins could not have grown oranges, and Mulholland stolen his water without earlier federal intervention.

Agriculture, the gray area of economic development, prompted early western state action to advance wide-scale household farming, then Frank Wiggin’s infamous orange groves and, in fairly short order, large-scale commercial agriculture. By the time John Steinbeck’s heroes were making their way from the Dust Bowl to employment on southern Californian farms, a second book, Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field (1939) provided vivid testimony of the existence and weaknesses of California’s highly developed commercial agriculture complex. Donald Worster (1992) argues that, over 40 years, California and other western states developed into a hydraulic economy similar to that of the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians—an economy based on farming made possible by irrigation accomplished through concerted, large-scale government public works.

The government–irrigation nexus grew out of an 1871 private firm, the San Joaquin and King’s River Canal and Irrigation Company, headquartered in San Francisco. This corporation opened up the San Joaquin Valley, and within two years irrigated over 16,000 acres. Rich and poor, big and small farmers flooded into California, and by the 1880s new migrants had consumed nearly every drop of water in sight. The 1895 formation of the Fruit Growers Exchange prompted yet more marketing cooperatives that fed the grocery stores of the nation—and drained more water. Deeper wells were required. In order to accommodate further growth, eventually large-scale irrigation was required.

In 1887 the Wright Act (California) authorized farmers to organize a quasigovernment entity that could own land, build irrigation complexes and tax the landowners: the agricultural district was born. “By 1920 there were 71 irrigation districts in the state, most of them put together in the boom years of 1915 to 1920. The largest, covering over a half million acres, was in the Imperial Valley” (Worster, 1992, p. 60). It was only a question of time, and in the late 1930s the New Deal federal government commenced the Central Valley Project. The quest for water for a thirsty population and growing economy had drawn the federal government into the provision of infrastructure necessary for western states’ economic expansion. It didn’t come willingly (Hundley, 2009).

In 1917 seven states formed the League of the Southwest to promote development (irrigation) from the Colorado River. Congress in 1921 authorized the states to enter into an agreement to allocate the flow and resources of the Colorado. So in 1922 the Colorado River Compact, a controversial agreement, was signed and the river’s water rights were allocated to each member state.¹² The federal government played a major role in the politics and negotiation of the Compact; indeed, Worster asserts that much pressure for the first federally constructed dam program came from the Bureau of Land Reclamation as well as the City of Los Angeles.¹³ Worster’s take was that without the Frank Wiggins—Los Angeles Chamber entrepreneurial drive to encourage migration and commercial agriculture, there would have been little reason to construct the dam system. He cities Mulholland, who had earlier declared (1907): “If we don’t get the water, we won’t need it. We have to get the water or quit growing” (Worster, 1992, p. 69). In any case, the Colorado River Compact made dam construction and electrification of the inland West possible.

A confirmed Privatist, Calvin Coolidge, signed the Boulder Canyon Act in 1928 and set in motion federal dam construction. President Hoover in 1930 dedicated the dam and started construction (that’s why they call it the Hoover Dam, stupid). In any case, the Hoover Dam was completed and generating power by 1937. At that time, however, Harold Ickes, FDR’s Secretary of the Interior, changed the name to the Boulder Dam.

Hoover Dam was followed in 1938 by Parker Dam, located 150 miles downstream and furnishing water for the California Aqueduct which supplied the City of Los Angeles. Then came the building of the Imperial Dam and the All-American Canal to supply the agri-business interests farther south on the Mexican border. Then Davis Dam began to go up in 1946, and soon after the Morelos Dam in Mexico … the names proliferated endlessly … Blocked, trapped, stilled and siphoned off, the Colorado finally ceased in normal seasons to reach the sea. (Worster, 1992, pp. 70–71)

Somebody somewhere might be thinking about highways, so let’s switch from dams and water to a happier note—Route 66. The Will Rogers Highway began construction in 1926 and crossed over 2400 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica.¹⁴ Although not completely paved until 1938, Route 66 served the function performed by the National Road (opening up the Southwest)—but without the controversy the latter engendered. In short order, Route 66 became part of the American fabric and legend: the highway traveled by Grapes of Wrath Dust Bowlers; the route of wartime industrial decentralization and population migration; and an early 1960s’ television series my wife loved. Federal aid to highways increased from $216 million in 1932 to $805 million by 1936. Much of these federal highway monies, however, were spent in urban areas such as Triborough Bridge in NYC and the Arroyo Seco Freeway in Los Angeles (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003, p. 78).

Accordingly, by the New Deal, the federal government had four decades of deep involvement in western infrastructure. FDR, however, faced other more complex issues than infrastructure in confronting the Great Depression: rural poverty, marginal farmers/livestock, a Dust Bowl and a large rural population in a nation that, in 1920, had on aggregate just achieved a bare majority of urban residents. That is a story for Chapter 13.

THE CROWN JEWEL OF THE PACIFIC URBAN HIERARCHY: THE US NAVY

We started this chapter off with city-building. That discussion asserted, among other observations, that cities in the city-building “phase” highly prioritize economic development and that, by its nature, city-building is closely associated with our third driver, the competitive (regional/national) hierarchy. Left unsaid in that discussion, but now abundantly apparent, city-building generally involves ED strategies that tap into either/both building the industry/sector jurisdictional economic base or some form of citizen-attraction to increase city size, markets and so forth. The latter strategy is, of course, complicated by the reality that some cities “enjoy” heavy population inflows due to factors over which they have little control.

After 1900 Pacific western cities were in “growth mode” and the Pacific/West regional hierarchy was emerging. San Francisco (population 417,000 in 1910) was king of the mountain, followed by LA (319,000), Seattle (237,000) and Portland (207,000). In that decade events conspired to offer a “crown jewel” from the federal government to a Pacific port city. The jewel was the headquarters for a brand-spanking new Pacific fleet. Competition for naval facilities and bases, triggered by the prospective opening of the Panama Canal (August 1914), also overlapped with World War I. The canal was a game-changer. Each Pacific Coast city considered it an opportunity to diversify their economy and to grow their economic base. The race was on!

In the competition that emerged a sophisticated ED strategy was pursued by the above port cities. Labeled “Fortress California,” a landmark work by R. Lotchin, the strategy was already a time-honored one to positively affect federal decision-making to land some federal resource, facility or grant/ investment. More than 25 years would pass (1937) before the crown jewel was awarded—to San Francisco. In the interim the port cities of California competed to attract the jewel and the associated facilities that came with the Pacific Fleet. The ultimate winner in that competition was a city not on the above list, a city less than one-tenth the size of San Francisco—a city that forged a “fortress” strategy with which the other cities could not, or would not, effectively compete. If the Goliath was San Francisco, the David was San Diego (population less than 40,000). Given the prominent role of the federal government in western development, the fortress strategy could potentially be applied to the quest for any number of federal or state resources. Although not yet in its “activist” period, the federal government offered sub-state economic developers a viable approach to achieve ED jurisdictional goals. The lessons learned from San Diego therefore are just as valuable now as they were then.

San Diego’s Fortress Strategy

The fleet’s commanding officer, Admiral George Dewey, initially rejected a southern California location for his new fleet; Seattle’s excellent harbor was the apple of his eye. One could not discount the meteoric rise of Los Angeles—although its harbor politics were convoluted at best. Competition for fleet headquarters, however, proved to be a major league “head-fake.” The real plums were the various facilities and naval bases associated with the fleet (that’s where the jobs and contracts were). Most of those facilities had nothing to do with the fleet headquarters.

The initial competition seemed to be between San Francisco, Seattle and upstart Los Angeles—but the ultimate victor was none of the above. The first Pacific naval base was built in San Diego. Considerably smaller and less well known, its natural advantages were substantial: “The Border City enjoyed proximity to the Panama Canal, a mild climate, and the whole population was united to convince the Secretary (of War) that San Diego was by far the best site for Naval Bases on the Pacific” (Lotchin, 1992, p. 30). San Diego got its economic development big boy pants on, and outhustled its major league competition. Outhustling meant developing a sophisticated fortress California naval attraction strategy that had the audacity to bypass the navy and the fleet commander, going directly to their boss.

Central to San Diego’s success was the election of former chamber director William Kettner, a Democrat, to Congress in 1911.

During his tenure in the House of Representatives … the greatest available naval prize was the main home base of the Pacific fleet … Kettner did not openly aim for this trophy … Instead [he] concentrated publicly on smaller, less dramatic and newsworthy projects. As any Navy man knew, enough of these modest installations could eventually become a major one. (Lotchin, 1992, p. 28)

Kettner, relying on the chamber for local leadership, worked the House, the Senate, the Naval Department and the Corps of Engineers—which would be responsible for the harbor itself. When Democrat Woodrow Wilson became President in 1913, Kettner appealed directly to both Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and Assistant Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt. With materials and research prepared by the chamber, Kettner countered San Francisco’s initial advantage, isolated Los Angeles Republicanled advances and opposed the navy’s preference for a northwest location.

The key first step was to secure approval and funding for the Corps to dredge the harbor—making it competitive with other Pacific coast harbors. Shortly after, a coaling station, a fuel oil station and a radio station were approved for San Diego. The chamber played a critical role in identifying and securing sites for several of these facilities. Land was donated to the navy in each instance. A marine base (the nucleus for present-day Camp Pendleton), a naval air station, a naval training station and a naval hospital were subsequently built (all by 1917)—then the big boy announcement in 1919: San Diego’s designation as a “Naval Operating Base,” followed by, in 1921, a naval supply depot, a submarine repair base and designation as “Eleventh Naval District Headquarters.” With success in each small project, Kettner reduced the cost of establishing the main facility in San Diego. San Diego, its economic development and congressional leadership in close alliance, had sustained a decade-long, single-minded target of acquiring naval facilities. In so doing it pioneered how to implement a “fortress-defense industry economic development strategy.”

In this single-minded pursuit the community, its business community and political leaderships were consistently supportive: “The press, city government, Harbor Commission, civic clubs, labor unions, political parties and the public stood solidly behind the courting of the Navy” (Lotchin, 1992, p. 35). The Harbor Commission (formed in 1928) was the culmination and physical expression of a united community effort to remove politics from economic development and concentrate upon clear, defined and specific objectives by doing whatever seemed necessary to “close the deal.”

The Harbor Commission possessed tremendous power. It could plan and to an extent regulate development of the heart of the city and thereby extract concessions in return for privileges granted, especially to the military … The multiplication of navy piers, anchorage grounds, base sites and turning basins in one part of the harbor was echoed in the proliferation of parks, yacht harbors, industrial sites, harbor drives and airport runways in another. (Lotchin, 1992, p. 36)

If Portland and Seattle developed port authorities to establish public control over harbor development, San Diego did so to achieve its Privatist economic development strategy.

The most important reason for the placement of what became the main home base in San Diego was that the city let [the Navy] put it there. For the most part the city held veto power … simply by virtue of its control over its own waterfront, which was almost entirely municipal property … Almost everything the services got in San Diego came from enthusiastic city offers and much local brokerage of critical matters. (Lotchin, 1992, pp. 40–41)

The city added its own related capital investment and monies; dredged on its own dime, using the fill for its airport; and then built piers and facilities to attract commercial uses while facilitating access by rail to the various facilities. In the years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, San Diego continued its focused economic development strategy, even more tightly weaving the city into the Naval and War Department’s decision-making fabric, adding still more naval and air facilities by relocating facilities in competing cities. It culminated in the 1935 San Diego World’s Fair, which promoted the accumulated assets in which the city sheltered the entire Pacific Battle Fleet.

In 2015 San Diego was the eighth largest city in the US, and California’s second largest.

Fortress Strategy and Competitive Urban Hierarchy

As described by Lotchin, early twentieth-century Pacific Coast cities (especially California) focused their city-building and chamber-style boosterism to forge a distinctive multi-decade ED–growth strategy based upon close ties between the city and the military. By linking municipal/state ED efforts to national defense policy (and war) these cities developed a sizeable economic agglomeration for their jurisdiction by acquiring military/governmental spending, facilities and personnel. In each of these pre-World War II Pacific cities, within its booster–competitive–chamber policy nexus, a network of business, political and national bureaucratic alliances were established, sufficient to obtain the desired military-related facilities/spending.

The core of these initiatives was an early military-industrial complex, an “Iron Triangle” of military/governmental bureaucracies, congressional delegations/ committees and municipal EDOs. Bureaucratically, chambers provided leadership, liaison and staff coordination with municipal/county/state, general business community, key private actors, the media and the Washington political/bureaucratic establishment. They arranged for incentives and developed formal programs support/implementation of the various projects.

San Diego was not the only Pacific city to do this. San Francisco competed intensely, and intelligently as well. The San Francisco Chamber actually received a municipal subsidy for its normal expenses and an extra one for its promotional activities. Elsewhere, chamber–government ties were especially close and their collaboration in military matters quite thick. The chambers’ courtship of the soldiers and sailors was institutionalized rather than improvisational. Although the chambers featured military affairs committees, by World War II the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce had a committee for both military and naval affairs and, in addition, published a weekly newsletter devoted solely to civil and military aviation (Lotchin, 1992, pp. 13–15).

Despite its initial lead and genuine desire, San Francisco was unable to leverage its size and legacy to develop its harbor. The city diffused its focus, simultaneously trying to satisfy its Progressive business through comprehensive planning, neighborhoods, arts and commerce encompassed an expanded City Beautiful initiative. Harbor and naval base attraction, a more Privatist-style economic development, failed to connect to Progressive business elites and ethnic voters. Decentralization of political life to wards and civic improvement neighborhoods diffused city hall’s ability to develop a sustained, focused effort on naval base attraction. Los Angeles, on the other hand, could not muster the sustained intensity of a community-supported commitment to the Naval Department made by San Diego: “The Navy certainly did not occupy the central place in the City of the Angels that it did in San Francisco, San Diego or Vallejo” (Lotchin, 1992, p. 38). Against this backdrop, the reader may be amazed to learn that San Francisco achieved formal designation of Pacific Fleet home port (1937)—only to lose that to Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor in 1940.

Fortress California has become so deeply impressed in our understanding of the early rise of California’s cities that one might think these cities invented the strategy—they didn’t. San Antonio,¹⁵ unequivocally, engaged in a defense-based economic development strategy essentially similar to Lotchin’s California cities—but in the 1880s (Charleston around 1900 as well, among others). What distinguishes the Pacific states’ use of this strategy is that it truly was a decentralized region-wide strategy used by municipalities to compete for position in the Pacific urban hierarchy. World War I unleashed a period of great prosperity as war production demanded western resources (fishing, mining, lumber, agriculture) and prompted shipbuilding for the newly established (1919) Pacific Fleet and a new, but struggling, aircraft industry as well. The insecurity of each city’s business elites increased, as did their perceived need for growth and regional dominance by acquiring facilities associated with the Pacific Fleet/military for their metropolitan area: “This naval/air realignment triggered economic war up and down the West Coast” (Lotchin, 1992, p. 6).

By the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, California cities had created a well-entrenched pattern of pursuing military wealth in order to create urban greatness … Each city had become a metropolitan-military complex by the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Each had long-standing political ties between civilian and military sectors as well as a huge military or potentially military economic investment to protect. Each had institutionalized its union with the military through political institutions like the naval and military affairs committees of the chambers of commerce, city governments and educational devices and had invented pageants [events] to link the emotional life of the metropolis to the fate of the military … and [these cities] competed with each other impetuously for the spoils of war. (Lotchin, 1992, pp. 1–2)

NOTES

1. Colorado 1876.The following became states after 1889: North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington (1989); Idaho, Wyoming, Utah (1890); Oklahoma (1907); New Mexico, Arizona (1912); Alaska, Hawaii (1958).

2. Check out Richard Wade’s The Urban Frontier (1959), which covers Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville and St. Louis.
3. For a view counter to Barth’s instant cities, see Lawrence Larsen and Robert Branyan, “The Development of an Urban Civilization on the Frontier of the American West,” Societas, vol. 1 (1971), pp. 33–50.
4. California in 1890 was 49 percent urban, Colorado (45 percent) and Utah and Washington (35 percent). See Mohl (1985, p. 11, Table 2) and Oliver Knight, Toward an Understanding of the Western Town, Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 1 (1973), pp. 37–8.
5. A stop on the Chisholm Trail, Wichita’s initial city-builders included “Buffalo Bill” Mathewson (not “Buffalo Bill” Cody).
6. Home of the Cherokees and the Choctaw Nation, the nickname “Sooner State” comes from those early settlers who illegally had entered the Territory and settled down in the “choicest” of sites.
7. San Francisco port centered on a state-operated immigrant center (300,000 Chinese in 1850-82). Chinese immigration was legal (the Burlingame Treaty) although limited (non-citizenship).
8. HistoryLink.org, Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History.
9. A Progressive leader in port legislation, Virgil G. Bogue, drafted waterfront plans for Seattle, Grays Harbor and Tacoma; his motivation was to create coordinated public ownership “as practiced by European ports.”

10. Some examples are: Seattle (1911), Grays Harbor (1911), Vancouver Washington (1912), Tacoma (1918), Bellingham (1920), Everett Washington (1917), Kalama Washington (1921), Longville Washington (1921), Olympia (1922), Longville Washington (1922) and Anacortes Washington (1926).
11. Could someone explain the Joshua thing to me? I guess oranges don’t grow on Joshua trees?
12. The states are Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, California and Nevada.
13. Chinatown (1974)—produced by Roman Polanski and starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway—tells LA’s side of the tale. The Library of Congress cited this film as “culturally, historically … significant,” so it must be true.
14. The inspiration and political pressure for the highway is credited to two businessmen, Cyrus Avery of Tulsa Oklahoma and John Woodruff of Springfield Missouri, working within the American Association of State Highway and Transportation. Route 66 was intended to replace three existing highways. Taking advantage of 1916 federal legislation that authorized a federal role in highway construction, its original purpose was to simply connect the numerous small towns along the route to the national transportation system/economy.
15. Boulder Springs embraced it in the post-World War II period, but so did Houston and so many other cities.