The West: New Deal, war years, and the fifties
Whether western growth was driven by a Kondratieff Cycle or Schumpeterian entrepreneurial innovation—or 1000 other forces and factors—is left for others. What we do know is that after 1940 the West was shoved into a brand new world in which it was more led than leader, and once entered was more leader than led.
Unlike the South, which in so many ways resisted its transformation into a new economic and political order, the West was simply overwhelmed by it. But it did not just go along for the ride; the West embraced its change and emerged at war’s end a radically different place and population than it was in 1930. Between 1940 and 1960 (or so) western jurisdictions witnessed a new, federally created, modern economic base which attracted huge population in-migration from which a new western (metropolitan and national) hierarchy emerged.
The American West emerged from the Second World War as a transformed region. In 1941 many westerners feared that the expansion of the region had come to a close. The economy was stagnant, population growth has ceased, and the colonial dependence of the region on the older East pervaded most aspects of life. But by 1945 the war had wrought a startling transformation. Westerners now had visions of unlimited growth and expansion … The West emerged from the war as a path-breaking, self-sufficient region with unbounded optimism for its future. (Nash, 1985, pp. 215–16)
The transformation was so abrupt (lasting only five years) and so fundamental that economic development was left to cope with inadequate settlement-era policy systems; frontier-style economic bases; all sorts of public and private entrepreneurs; and hordes of new residents from someplace else that crushed existing social-political institutions while jump-starting an entirely different economic base. It was a time of “instant cities, instant industries and sectors with instant residents and workforces.” Transformation did not happen overnight, but over the 20 or 25 years after 1940. At the end of that period, western municipalities grabbed hold of a Big City ED strategy, urban renewal (Nash, 1999), to announce to the world they had arrived and were formidable competitors in the new national urban hierarchy. That last story will be told in Chapter 15. This chapter’s story is why it happened and how western policy systems and economic developers coped with, and gradually harnessed, change to turn it to their advantage.
The tone of this chapter must already seem so different from our presentations of Big City and the South’s New Deal and war years. As a region, excepting its string of Pacific coastal cities, the West was simply underdeveloped: not a developing region, but a region that had exploded in a burst of nineteenth-century homesteading, railroad construction and initial city-building settlement—and then ran out of steam. Turner claimed in the 1890s that the frontier had closed. Whether accurate or not, there is no disputing growth was uneven at best in the following decades. Rates of growth masqueraded as rather mediocre raw numbers that left most western urban areas (again excepting the Pacific coastal cities) little more than third-tier cities whose economic bases, if lucky, were propelled by oil or commodity booms, or otherwise dependent on slow-growing or stagnant hinterlands. As late as 1940, the 13 states produced only 5 percent of the nation’s value-added manufacturing (15 percent of its population). The Depression did not help.
Californian cities, especially Los Angeles, attracted migrants like the Dust Bowlers from the southwest. Colorado Springs tourism plummeted and Phoenix/Tucson retiree immigration dropped off. The cattle industry and mining struggled along with the agricultural sector, as did oil production and its associated industry sectors. Manufacturing, mostly confined to Californian cities (New Mexico had a whopping $8 million of value-added manufacturing) kept its head above water: composed of branch plants (energy equipment, machinery, automotive) and mostly small job shops, manufacturing struggled, as did the South, with ICC-enforced “Pittsburgh-Plus Pricing” that priced western firms out of the market.
But the Dust Bowl, and for that matter a good deal of productive western rural lands, was grossly overexploited—called “the Great Plow Up,” after WWI intensive wheat planting expanded into areas where native grasslands had been untouched. By the Depression, they had played out, but wheat production by 1931 had increased to the extent there was a “glut” in the midst of the worst years of the Depression (Worster, 1992, pp. 95–100). Severe drought and depressed markets took the bottom out of western agriculture and livestock. Besides the proverbial Dust Bowl, the small farm Great Plains were the hardest hit. North Dakota’s $145 per capita income was less than 40 percent of the national average. One-third of its farms and homes were in foreclosure, one of two residents on relief, its farm population dropped 17 percent (South Dakota, 15 percent) and over 120,000 people left the state (Nash, 1985, pp. 6, 9). Wyoming lost one-third of its residents (see the Taylor Act below).
All this became evident after the first ecological accounting conducted by the Forest Service in 1936 (after urging by the TVA/electrification advocate Senator Norris). Overall the western range had been depleted by 52 percent from its virgin condition (Worster, 1992, pp. 46–7). Since the non-urban West was owned and managed mostly by the United States Government, the collapse of western agriculture and livestock production meant the federal government had to lead. Like the South and Big Cities, much of the economic development story during the Depression involved the federal government.
ROOSEVELT’S RURAL WESTERN REVOLUTION
New Deal programs poured a great deal of money into western states. Between 1933 and 1939 an estimated $7.6 billion (1940 dollars) of federal non-military funds were invested/transferred to the West (Nash, 1985, p. 5). The New Deal continued previous Republican infrastructure projects, extending dam-building initiatives to the Columbia and Missouri Rivers (1944 Pick–Sloan Plan). Benefits included hydroelectric services, new recreation areas (tourism) and irrigation. There was also loss of Native Indian villages and other archeological sites. Roosevelt and Ickes (Dept. of the Interior, Public Works Program) take exclusive credit for the Columbia River system infrastructure, the
Bonneville Dam (Washington), Grand Coulee Dam on the Colorado and the multi-state Missouri River basin development. The New Deal literally “poured” the foundation for future trans-Mississippi urbanization, thru irrigation, energy production and water access that permitted increased population and industry. The expertise garnered in dam, highway and bridge construction by western construction firms would later serve America (and the West) well. These firms—Bechtel-McCone, Bendix, Kaiser, MacDonald and Kahn, Knudsen—would construct the shipyards, factories, housing projects and new logistical system that propelled the “arsenal of democracy (Herman, 2012, pp. 50–57).
An example of the link between this infrastructure and municipal economic development programs is found in Phoenix. With completion of the Roosevelt Dam in 1911 its population tripled to 29,000 over the following decade. Arizona statehood, with Phoenix as its state capital (1912), didn’t hurt its growth either. The lure of further growth captured Phoenix’s economic development business and policy leaders’ attention, and during the twenties the city and chamber conducted extensive promotion campaigns to recruit residents into their new-found “Valley of the Sun.” Phoenix was the place “where winter never comes.” Phoenix grew during the Depression, attracting a 1940 population of over 65,000.
The Rural Electrification Act (1935) established cooperative electric power companies in rural areas across the nation. Literally, teams of electricians went from house to house in targeted areas and installed a 60-amp circuit, a 20-amp kitchen circuit and a ceiling light fixture and switch in each room of the house (and barn). Transmission and distribution lines crisscrossed what were previously thought of as remote areas. Much time has passed, but the reader of today should appreciate the almost revolutionary change these simple measures had for much of our geography and many of our people. This is basic infrastructure of the modern age, and the New Deal federal government brought it to where the private markets could not serve.
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Work Progress Administration (WPA) of 1935 were the New Deal workforce/unemployment programs. Harry Hopkins and the WPA employed unemployed (men) to carry out public works projects (roads, parks, bridges and public facilities-city/county halls, sewer systems, hospitals and libraries). Much of the National Park system (central to western tourism) benefited from the CCC. Between 1933 and 1943 the CCC built cabins and bathhouses in 14 parks, installed 1850 miles of telephone wires and carved out 5700 acres of campgrounds and picnic areas (Pitcaithley, 2001, p. 306). New Dealers initiated a serious reform of the American Indian Reservation system.
Roosevelt’s first New Deal launched an American agricultural revolution—a twentieth-century American version of the eighteen-century English enclosure movement. New Deal federal land management (the Taylor Land Grazing Act) and federal farm programs (AAA) fostered increased concentration in both farming and livestock raising sectors. Passed in 1934, the Taylor Act effectively ended the long-standing open, loosely monitored, private grazing of cattle and sheep (and water rights) on federally owned land and inaugurated a new, aggressive regulation of private use of federal land. The net effect, aside from benefiting larger commercial entities better able to secure limited federal usage permits, was to move smaller and marginal homesteaders and ranchers from rural areas to regional urban centers during the late thirties and the war years. Des Moines grew nearly 13 percent from 1930 to 1940, Denver 12 percent, Bismarck North Dakota 40 percent, Fargo 14 percent and Pierre South Dakota 18 percent. These farm refugees eventually found employment as war production workers.
WAR: THE UNSPOKEN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY
To think of war as a conscious ED strategy is outrageous and ridiculous—war kills and destroys. But it does also create and prompt disruption, aka innovation. The old saw that circulated during the seventies was the federal government, i.e. federal investment and transfer payments provided the Sunbelt not only with infrastructure, employment and population, but also with a new and fast-growing set of sector gazelles. The truth is that for the most part World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War drove federal investment. The federal government was the transfer agent, the arms dealer of regional change. Congress and the President expended an estimated $70 billion from 1941 to 1945 in the West—half of that went to California, which alone secured one-tenth of all federal expenditure in that period (Nash, 1985, p. 19). The section heading above may be crudely put, but the reality is that war presents both dilemma and opportunity for a jurisdictional economic developer—and WWI-era economic developers across the nation saw their opportunities and took them. The simple, brutal observation is that war prompted and facilitated American regional change in our transition era.
Industrial Decentralization
Industrial decentralization has been broached in our previous chapters. It has already been observed that Big Cities garnered more than their disproportionate share of war-related facilities investment and war contracts—they had an initial near-monopoly on war production facilities. The South captured more than its fair share of military facilities, and a good deal of manufacturing as well. The West in 1941 had only 8 percent of the nation’s value-added manufacturing, an incredibly low base which yielded extremely high investment/growth rates—but the raw numbers are still staggering.1 The real story goes beyond that: war production (and military facilities) jump-started, transformed, the jurisdictional economic base of most western cities with up-to-date, cutting-edge processes, equipment and hot-button military products. Pittsburgh made the steel, but Los Angeles made the planes and missiles, and Silicon Valley and Dallas designed the software/chips.
The Defense Plant Corporation (DPC) provided capital for 96 percent of new rubber plants, 58 percent of new aluminum plants, 90 percent of new magnesium plants and 71 percent of aircraft manufacturing facilities—almost all of which was west of the Mississippi. The DPC alone built 344 industrial plants in the West during the war, at a cost of nearly $1.9 billion (1940 dollars). Included were new complete steel mills in Provo Utah and Fontana California—the only ones west of the Mississippi. The DPC also erected the world’s largest magnesium plant, 16 miles from a little city (of 8400) in Nevada. A second processing plant costing $200 million was built in 1941 by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) at the behest of Senator McCarren and the Las Vegas Chamber. The city’s population doubled during the five WWII war years, and at their height in 1944 the plants employed 15,000 workers, literally in the middle of the desert. The Metals Reserve Corporation invested in mines and metal production in California, Idaho, Nevada, Colorado and Utah. In Utah alone, by the middle of 1942, the military built ten bases, an R&D facility, three training facilities, huge supply depots, and repair and maintenance facilities;2 and stationed 60,000 military personnel and employed another 60,000 civilians (Nash, 1985, pp. 21–4).
In this war boom the cities/states that prospered most were those that housed existing industries. Seattle was already home to Boeing and possessed a naval shipyard; Los Angeles and Wichita with their existing aircraft industry; Houston built upon its chemical and energy sectors; and San Francisco/San Diego, with its military bases and logistics operations, exploded. Honolulu was going to be the home base staging area for any Pacific war regardless of what was, or was not, there. Gulf Coast cities were impossible for German U-boats to get to. The Air Force (General Davenport Johnson) as early as 1940 decided that “the difficulty of continuous flying training is in direct proportion to the distance north of … the 37th parallel” (Abbott, 1998, p. 9). The Transportation Act of 1940, passed at the behest of FDR and western/southern legislators, modified ICC railroad rate-setting that discriminated between regions— challenging for the first time in a half-century Pittsburgh Plus hegemonic rail shipping rates.
Western states built nearly twice as much combat equipment as would have been the case if supply contracts had been allocated in proportion to exiting industrial capacity … Its thirty two officially designed metropolitan areas received 88 percent of Western war contracts, absorbed 69 percent of federally-funded industrial facilities, and 41 percent of new military facilities. (Abbott, 1998, pp. 9, Table 3)
Industrial decentralization and military facility siting was only part of the story. If you are an economic developer and you don’t shoot your rifle into the air, nothing will fall down. If a city wanted a facility, factory, housing or contract it had to fight against other cities that were competing. The strategy usually centered on local chamber leadership, coordination and programmatic implantation of a long-term commitment to work with state congressional and military bureaucratic leaderships to encourage military approval, congressional authorization and budget appropriation. This was an iron, military–industrial triangle—at its best, an economic development iron triangle. A military–government agglomeration produces relationships across a number of service/ manufacturing sectors and firms.
From the local level sites were identified, acquired, cleared and even developed to facilitate the investment. Lobbying could take years. At its core, chasing military investment was a cluster/agglomeration strategy that any city, including one in the middle of a desert, could employ. Its spectacular success resulted from a reality that military/government investment was often a “platform agglomeration” or “cluster generator” that spun off companies, sectors, occupations, knowledge and even industries for decades to come. A platform agglomeration can create a culture—a way of life, a way of thinking. Key participants in a platform cluster are research/university (RAND) and research entrepreneurs/gurus such as Robert Millikan and Theodore von Kármán at Cal-Tech in the case of Southern California.
Each investment became “infrastructure’ for future innovation and investment. Perhaps the key to it all was hard, sustained commitment to the strategy and a local consensus to do what it takes, as long as it takes to make it work. That commitment certainly was made by San Diego and Los Angeles, and by other cities such as Houston, San Antonio and even Colorado Springs and Hattiesburg Alabama. Lotchin (1992, p. 353) cites a goodly number of other metro competitors who have also embraced this strategy, most of which are Sunbelt (exceptions include Hartford CT, Springfield MA, Bath ME and Rock Island and Quad Cities IL. Victory was not automatic. North Dakota and Wyoming failed despite, for example, the former setting up a business organization (the North Dakota War Resources Committee) and a pure business-led group (the Greater North Dakota Association), which hired a full-time lobbyist and scheduled regular meetings and tours with military decision-makers. On the other hand, Nevada’s Senator McCarran proved most effective.
The “Los Angeles Plan” demonstrated the type of commitment required to compete in these years. The plan revolved around the chamber and its Washington lobbyists. A formal record-keeping operation kept the chamber aware of which plants among LA’s 6000 factories could be converted to war production. The chamber maintained a contract with the Defense Distribution Service to keep that government agency informed of potential defense contractors in the area. This program became a model for other communities, and was part of the infrastructure of the military-fortress strategy. To curry favor, Los Angeles held special war bond referenda to finance construction of five US Navy ships. Los Angeles pursued the aircraft industry, which in 1939 employed about 20,000 workers. By 1943 it expanded to nearly a quarter of a million in Los Angeles County alone. Douglas, Hughes, North American and Lockheed located most of their national production in the Los Angeles metro area. UCLA created a new engineering program to meet the technical needs of the aircraft manufacturers.
Long Beach copied Los Angeles and expanded on its program. The Long Beach Chamber incorporated two subsidiaries—the Associated Defense Industries of Long Beach and the Long Beach Manufacturers—to carry out initiatives.
San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland were no shirkers. Their chamber-led programs diligently stalked/targeted key infrastructure initiatives such as airports and “defense highways.” The San Francisco Downtown Association financed a $150,000 contribution to the Salt Lake City (Utah) Chamber to secure federal approval for constructing a “Victory Highway” between those two cities; they competed with the Los Angeles Chamber that had established an office in Salt Lake City to build the same highway to Los Angeles (Lotchin, 1992, pp. 133–6). At the conclusion of the 1940 San Francisco Golden Gate Exposition, the Navy Department purchased the island which housed the exposition and built facilities that became part of the city’s wartime $3.99 billion in war contracts, $364 million in federally funded industrial facilities and $452 million in new military base facilities. Manufacturing employment during the war increased by over 100,000. The Bay Area built an estimated 26 percent of all ships constructed during the war (Abbott, 1998, p. 4).
Los Angeles was not alone in enjoying aircraft industry-related largesse. As early as 1916 surplus capital generated by the area’s oil and gas industry served as venture capital for locating aircraft manufacturing in Wichita Kansas. Over the next decade, entrepreneurs like (oilman) Jake Moellendick, Walter Beech, Lloyd Stearman and Clyde Cessna started new aircraft facilities.3 By 1929 a small Wichita “cluster” of ten aircraft firms employed 2000 workers and produced over 1000 planes (26 percent of the nation’s production). Most failed in the Depression, but Beech, Cessna and Stearman kept going, producing about 300 planes annually—and then came World War II. As early as September 1940, Wichita plants had military contracts worth $20 million. Employment soared from 2000 to more than 13,000 in less than a year, and then nearly quadrupled again to 60,000 before 1945. Effective lobbying in Washington by the newly formed Kansas Industrial Development Commission kept the aircraft contract spigot flowing. One of Wichita’s plants produced the Enola Gay, the B-29 which dropped the first atomic bomb (Shortridge, 2004, p. 252). Wichita’s population grew by 46 percent to 168,000 in 1950.
Phoenix offered the military a number of advantages, including year-round training in desert conditions and a protected inland location safe from enemy attack. With little fanfare the Phoenix business community and chamber adopted their version of San Diego’s public–private intergovernmental strategy to acquire military/defense related facilities (Carl Hayden handled the congressional end): “Business leaders offered many inducements and every form of cooperation.” By 1942 three army and six air bases (plus defense production plants) had been installed in the Phoenix metro area. Bradford Luckingham attributes subsequent Phoenix postwar expansion to “a multiplier effect” where early production plants “attracted others. Predominant were light and clean industries, especially electronics firms which flourished in the low humidity climates,” not clashing with the city’s critical tourism sector (Luckingham, 1983, p. 310).
Federal Government as City-Builder
Accustomed to nineteenth-century adventures of western Privatist city-builders, during WWII we meet up with city-builders such as the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The earliest city-building example on a large scale was Henderson Nevada—a suburb, sort of, of Las Vegas. Henderson was a semi-desert/ small town where in 1941 the Defense Plant Corporation required Basic Magnesium Inc. to construct worker housing. At war’s end about 15,000 lived there, and in 1953 it was incorporated as a city. Today Henderson is a Las Vegas blue-collar suburb whose population exceeds 250,000—a “boomburb” of the seventies and eighties. Another example of federal military city-building was Richland Washington, located along the Columbia River.
Richland was built in 1943–44 to accommodate DuPont, then General Electric, plutonium from uranium-238 factories. The city-building was conducted by the ever-friendly US Army Corps of Engineers, who, after the 1943 harvest, evicted the local asparagus farmers, giving them 30 days to move out. Both companies jointly constructed the Hanford manufacturing facility, following which the Corps “attractively” designed accompanying housing and neighborhoods. At its peak during the war 51,000 lived there. Residents described early Richland as:
a carnival (with music played over the public address system), as a concentration camp (with barracks and guarded fences) and a gigantic bus station (where you wouldn’t … leave your luggage unattended) … Most of the workers (residents) left, pursued by “termination winds” that drove great clouds of dust … (causing) mass turnover in the workforce. (Abbott, 1998, pp. 22–3)
Fortunately, Richland enjoyed a “second wind.” After the war nearly 22,000 residents called it home. Today, Richland, with its still operating Hanford Plant, has matured into “the atomic age equivalent of a homey small town” of nearly 50,000.
Richland, of course, was not the only small town created to manufacture the atomic bomb. The most famous example of atomic bomb city-building is, of course, Los Alamos New Mexico—35 easily walkable (sarcasm) miles from Albuquerque. The site was chosen by such noted urbanists as General Leslie Grove and Robert Oppenheimer, because it was … well … nowhere (for its isolation). The predecessor of the AEC constructed the town—a closed community owned, managed and guarded by the US Army and now the AEC. Los Alamos (which means “cottonwoods”) is presently an elite, well-off community of 12,000, the most highly educated in America—nearly 12 percent of those above 65 being millionaires. It has become the poster child for knowledge-based economic development.
The Federal Government Jumpstarts Airport Development
In 1918 the US Postal Service with government-owned planes and army pilots offered the first air mail service. No private operator responded to Postal Service bid for services. Congress mandated Postal Service use of private carriers (1926) and installation of a national air navigation system, while prohibiting direct federal airport funding. Subsequent private airport development was rudimentary: runways leveled but not graded; a few buildings at one end and a few lights. Commercial air activity depended on federal contracts to deliver the mail (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003, p. 124).
Entrepreneurs attracted to early commercial flight typically flew the planes—they didn’t form businesses; and conventional capital investment in this young, crash-prone sector was difficult to justify—like space travel today perhaps. An aircraft industry developed during the twenties, but aircraft design/technology in this period was little more than big engines on wings—with a propeller tossed in. The pilot’s seat could literally be on top of the gas tank. Customers were intrigued, but trains arrived on time and traveled on foggy nights. Into this private sector void jumped chambers of commerce.
The potential inherent in air travel and commercial flight pressed harshly on the tender sensitivities of our competitive urban hierarchy. “Be the first on your block to have an airport” was certainly one motivation behind chamber enthusiasm, but “you’d better not be the last on your block” was another. “Atlanta leaders mobilized successfully to ensure that their city, not Birmingham, would be the terminus for southeastern airmail service,” and Congressmen delivered the pork of Postal Service contracts to firms in their jurisdictions (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003, p. 124). Dallas and Fort Worth argued for decades (until 1973) on airport-related issues. In Los Angeles, literally a dozen groups developed competing proposals for siting LAX. The victor, a site in the Inglewood area northwest of downtown, exposed what would be a major problem with 1920s’ siting decisions—they were too close to settled areas and would quickly be enveloped as the jurisdiction grew. Still, as late as 2003, 12 of the nation’s 31 “large hub airports” sat on expanded 1920s’ original sites (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003, pp. 125–7, Tables 5.1, 5.2).
New Deal programs (WPA) pumped nearly $440 million into airports (estimated to be about 75 percent of 1930s’ airport capital investment). LaGuardia Airport was built using WPA funds. In 1938 the Civil Aeronautics Act (CAA) asserted federal oversight over the fledgling industry and, among other powers, set rates, airmail rates and standards, and restricted entry of new competitors. In short order commercial flying, a vital sub-state infrastructure, was transformed into a utility-like sector. The CAA established a grant program for airport construction. World War II transformed a commercial sector into a military sector critical to national survival: “During World War II, the federal government spent about $3.25 billion developing military airfields (about half of which it turned over to the states and localities after the war) and another $400 million improving civilian airports for wartime military use” (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003, p. 125).
Federal military-related airport development wasted little time in becoming a critical local economic development focal point. Aviation-related industries and an aviation infrastructure were by wartime absolutely vital necessities for a community of almost any size. Communities without airports had to construct them in light of the huge increases in both passenger and commercial travel, and those communities with an existing airfield dramatically expanded capacity. Chicago provides a sense of the economic development-related disruption caused by World War II federal airportrelated activities. Chicago’s Midway Airport (10 miles outside of downtown and the nation’s busiest commercial airport in the 1940s) had to be either massively expanded or a new airport developed. Four sites contested for a new airport. A site owned by the army, the Douglas Aircraft site (17 miles from the business district and requiring substantial highway construction), beat its rivals after the army was convinced by local Congressmen to donate the site to the city. Cities across the nation could tell similar stories—and that is how much of our current urban airport infrastructure came into being.
Do You Know the Way to San Jose?
Jobs attracted people. Western states (1940–45) attracted about 7 million net new residents. The West’s urban population increase of 8,245,000 (1940s) was virtually identical to the region’s total population increase of 8,302,000; 13 of 15 western metropolitan areas and 43 of 49 metros in the South gained population compared to only 25 of the 74 metropolitan areas in the North (Abbott, 1981, p. 100). The pace of migration was intense and rapid. Between 1940 and November 1943, 28 of the West’s 32 metropolitan districts gained civilian residents. The West’s only losers were smaller “college cities” whose youth went off to war. The corresponding figure for the eastern metro areas was 53 gainers and 52 losers (Abbott, 1998, pp. 12–13). San Diego nearly doubled in population during the decade (92 percent), Seattle only grew by 45 percent, Denver 38 percent, but Phoenix by 78 percent. Los Angeles City grew an anemic 31 percent (sarcastic).
Between April 1940 and October 1941 San Diego recorded the nation’s highest population growth, 27 percent, with Wichita the second highest at 20 percent. Close behind were Long Beach, Corpus Christi and Wichita Falls. The largest absolute increases in population during the same months were 40,000 in Seattle, 50,000 in Washington DC and 150,000 in Los Angeles. Rates of population increase for the early 1940s ranged from 30 percent to 65 percent, and the annual population increment was between 16,000 and 20,000. The story was the same as in Mobile and Charleston, Fort Worth and Wichita, San Diego, Albuquerque, Seattle, San Francisco and smaller Sunbelt cities. Growth did not stop at war’s end.
Most wartime-relocated workers stayed after the war (Herman, 2012, pp. 259–60). Postwar Denver, for example, grew the most, gaining between 30,000 and 50,000 new residents each decade until the middle 1970s. Tourism, lifestyle and scientific research as well as associated high-tech manufacturing grew alongside the early federal government-related sectors. Much of this growth, such as the 1956 Martin Marietta Titan missile aerospace manufacturing facility in Littleton, located in the suburbs. There are literally a hundred set of postwar statistics and stories that could be told. Below is a mini description of Portland (OR) that conveys a sense of the housing/public housing issues and atmosphere that characterized western (and southern) war and postwar production.
Over the 1940s the City of Portland increased to 467,000 from a 1940 base of 305,000—a miserly 23 percent. The Portland metro, however, increased by 207,000 or 37 percent. Portland grew before the war even started because the prewar lend lease program to England/the USSR traveled through Vladivostok by way of Portland docks. Lend lease spurred Portland shipbuilding and aluminum reduction plants. Hometown boy Henry Kaiser quickly built three shipyards, creating jobs for 30,000 workers by 1941. By 1943 Portland shipyard workers totaled something in excess of 115,000. Early wartime migrants to Portland were young, male and unemployed. Despite their promising potential as the future “Greatest Generation” these fine fellows, left on their own as young workers, could often be found lying on the barroom floor. Growth is one thing, but rapid growth can be very painful indeed. Portland, hitherto a business-led community and conservative electorate, was overwhelmed by these young male workers. The mayor had to clamp down on the “Virginia City” boomtown conviviality that characterized some neighborhoods and downtown watering holes.
Where did Portland’s workers come from? A survey by the city’s Kaiser shipyards found that 5000 workers came from Idaho, 4000 from Montana, 3000 from North Dakota and 2000 each from South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois—all easily accessible with a ticket on the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific railroads. There were also 3000 New Yorkers and 1000 from Alabama “recruited by the company and transported on chartered railroad cars” (Abbott, 1998, pp. 14–17). Rapid population growth greatly affected the city’s character and lifestyle. The draft and severe worker shortages changed that atmosphere. By 1943 nearly one in four shipyard workers was female—Portland could easily have been the true home of “Rosie the Riveter.”4 In desperation, the city of Portland conducted a block-by-block survey/inspection to locate women available to work in the shipyards.
When the federal Housing Act was approved, Pacific Coast and Central Plains cities were in the first phases of the war production migration tsunami—rapidly escalating into a housing crisis. When they embraced slum clearance and public or defense housing, it was for different reasons/goals—in an entirely different policy context— than their eastern compatriots. Although, Portland felt intensive pressure from migration early on, local resistance to slum clearance and public housing attracted little sympathy in Portland’s more conservative politics. Despite intense pressure from New Deal housing officials to follow through on the 1937 Housing Act, in 1938 Portland voters rejected it by 32,000 to 18,000, creating a local housing authority. Only by the middle of 1940, with the shipyards in crisis, did the city council endorse approval (Abbott, 1981, p. 102). Mayor Earl Riley eventually bypassed the existing planning commission, forming his own housing authority which then proceeded to build shipyard-related worker housing—in Portland’s suburbs (story to follow below).
It’s easy to talk of war production migration, but wartime migration often exacted seriously negative effects on non-whites.
War time booms … emptied farm counties and small towns of their unemployed … Labor demands of defense plants triggered a “second” Great Migration of blacks from farm to city. New migration streams from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana to the cities of the West Coast were added to the established flow from the South East to the North … Competition for jobs and housing led to racial violence. (Abbott, 1987, p. 59)
Still, as late as 1950, the South retained 63 percent of the nation’s black population, while the entire West held less than 3 percent (570,000) (McDonald, 2008, p. 29). Compared to Los Angeles Portland was lucky. Los Angeles became a so-called melting pot containing black, Mexican and native white Okies and Arkies. The Mexican community doubled (to 400,000), and the city served as destination and a distribution point for 100,000 temporary Mexican workers under the Bracero Program (1942).5 The 1943 “Zoot Suit” riots devastated several neighborhoods. Riots that occurred in eastern cities, such as Detroit, were replicated in western cities as well (Omaha). Los Angeles, home to the majority of Japanese-Americans, imprisoned them in internment camps during the war. Japanese internment allowed others to take advantage of their old housing, jobs and businesses.
Postwar Industrial Decentralization: “The Gift that Keeps on Giving”
After 1947 war was “the gift that keeps on giving” as the Cold War, the Korean War, Vietnam and eventually a “permanent” war ensued. At WWII’s end there was too much existing “war-related” capacity, given demobilization. Facilities, airfields in particular, and factories closed down/downshifted across the nation; reconversion to peacetime production and all sorts of disruption occurred throughout 1946. In such an environment the military–chamber–metro–fortress ED nexus switched gears (did the reader really believe it would “fade away”?). Iron triangles refocused on preserving/securing the firm’s position within the local economic base. Industrial decentralization acquired a new meaning and context.
There was a regional bias in war production consolidation/reconversion. Much of the eastern industrial base could be converted back to consumer durable goods (cars and refrigerators). Old facilities, located in central cities, were particularly vulnerable. Technology, production efficiencies, transportation logistics and global markets meant older facilities were candidates for closedown. Regional and municipal alliances congealed into informal congressional voting blocs seeking to require military reinvestment/production contracts for these vulnerable factories. At the same time communities/states, generally in the West and “New South,” underwent a new “round” of military-related industrial decentralization and military contracts.
While many in the eastern Policy World were duking it out over future Housing Acts, a donnybrook within Congress over municipal war factory shutdowns and new military contracts erupted through 1954. Western and southern local/state EDOs were deeply involved in that struggle. Thus the battle lines in the decade following war’s end was between “haves” and “have-nots.” The “rump” regional alliances that characterized postwar industrial decentralization debate overlapped the IRB “shadow war” discussed in the last chapter—and the negative reaction to the “selling of the South.” Industrial decentralization, and now consolidation, became yet one more regional division, drifting toward the mid/late 1970s’ Second War between the States.
The military played a major role in this struggle. Their most pressing issue was to support newer weapons systems (aircraft and shipyards) that were concentrated in a few cities.6 The military’s postwar industrial decentralization debate centered on the threat caused by the concentration of production in a few large cities. Concentration meant war production was vulnerable to bomber, and now nuclear, attack. Nuclear bombs supposedly created a “crater” ranging between 3 and 10 miles. Between 1950 and 1954 that vulnerability increased with the arrival of nuclear missiles, bigger payloads, nuclear submarines and jets that could cross the North Pole and reach places never before accessible. Laugh, ignore and “harrumph” as one might, nuclear war was perceived as a very real threat well into the early 1980s—it became arguably the dominant issue of the era. Economic development now played in the shadows of another policy area. National interest seemingly dictated that have-nots be favored by building new facilities, if not closing down older existing haves’ facilities. The federal government, once again, was monkeying with local economic bases and infrastructure.
The battle first erupted in 1948 when defense officials pressured Boeing into producing a B-36 bomber in Wichita rather than Seattle. Military officials wanted a “defense in depth,” which meant relocation into the nation’s interior. Shortly after, military officials prized Chance-Vought from Connecticut to Dallas (the story of that, and the Dallas Chamber’s role was told in the last chapter); Consolidated Aircraft’s B-36 production was moved from San Diego to Fort Worth; a new GE “turbojet” engine plant was authorized to be built in Kansas City; and plans were announced to move Lockheed Aircraft from Burbank to Tulsa (Lotchin, 1993, pp. 50–51). Each of these facilities involved thousands of workers, a huge supplier network and logistics implications. ED’s metro–military nexus shifted into high gear: led initially by Seattle, in early 1949 they struck back. Seattle’s chamber, city hall and congressional delegation advocated a military policy that dispersed facilities/factories within the same metro area rather than decentralizing it away to a have-not metro. That’s when the 3-mile versus 10-mile bomb crater became relevant. The decision-making battleground was the no doubt well-known National Security Resources Board (NSRB).
Los Angeles formed its equally well-known EDO, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area Industrial Dispersion Committee, and the San Francisco-based, newly formed Bay Area Council joined with it in presenting their two cents worth to Congress and the NSRB. Fifty-two metropolitan areas formed similar industrial dispersion committees by the end of 1952 (Lotchin, 1993, p. 52). The pressure these metro EDOs exerted on both the military and Congress forged a formal dispersion policy (August 1951) that adopted the 10-mile crater metric; but the many exceptions and loopholes this created— requiring that each potential relocating plant had to seek approval from its local industrial dispersion committee, and providing accelerated tax write-offs and allowing local/state tax incentives—meant that in practical life the “haves” won.
Not to worry—the Korean War started in 1950. In the midst of the Korean War, the Truman administration, like FDR in 1940, wanted production fast and cheap— relocation and new facilities meant time and expense. Of the $8 billion new plant or plant expansion contracts released under Truman’s administration, most went to the haves. Truman’s plan favored sites around Detroit, New York, Pittsburgh and San Francisco. (Most of these facilities were built or expanded in suburbs, not central cities) (Lotchin, 1993, p. 52). Meanwhile, back at the Defense Department, the military were quite frustrated with their inability to achieve geographic dispersal to the have-nots. The have-nots were deeply infuriated.
We’re not done. Between July 1951 and midsummer 1956 two congressional committees thrashed out amendments to the 1950 Defense Production Act that would have fixed in stone a clear winner in our postwar industrial decentralization affair. The debate again seemingly ignored regional boundaries and followed the “have/have-not” distinction. When the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM) in January 1956 issued guidelines based on the principle of geographic as opposed to metropolitan decentralization, have-not Senators and Congressmen sprang into battle to support the ODM and bring to an end the ad hoc policy favoring the haves.
Senators Fulbright (Alabama) and Carl Mundt (South Dakota), attacking the haves, loudly proclaimed the dangers of nuclear vulnerability, but also decried that previous policy/legislation “pretty well ignored the locating of defense fabricating plants” in the middle West (central states). California’s Senators countered that such extra-regional dispersal involved nothing less than expensive “socialist planning” and would entail increased expenditure for local governments for infrastructure, streets and utilities. Connecticut’s Senator Horace Seely Brown argued that regional dispersal would “result in the denial of defense production contracts not only to our firms in Connecticut, but throughout New England.” Congressman Edward Boland noted Springfield Massachusetts’s opposition, as did Michigan’s Gerald Ford. Los Angeles Congressman McDonough argued that “Dispersal would disrupt the economy of all the large industrial areas of the Nation. Moving a plant out of St Louis to a weed patch somewhere is no solution.” Finally, the great state of Rhode Island chipped in:
We in Rhode Island … know intimately the burden inflicted by the flight of the textile industry to mills in the South, and the movement … of machinery-manufacturing to the Middle West. Decentralization would deal a death blow to the hopes and aspirations of many of our Rhode Island communities which are so desperately striving to pull themselves up virtually by their own bootstraps. (Lotchin, 1993, pp. 55–8)
I couldn’t have said it better. The vote for geographic, extra-region (have-nots) industrial decentralization came in June 1956. It won by 64–19 (Senate) and 210–207 (House). The have-nots overturned the industrial defense policy.
As Lotchin concluded, “the geography of the vote revealed its sectional biases.” Washington State and California stood with New England and the Great Lakes industrial belt on the losing side; they could not hold Pennsylvania and New York or midwest non-urban districts. Representatives of the South and West voted 75 percent in favor of geographic dispersal. From that point on, military contracts for new facilities and weapons through the 1960s went to “have-nots” in the South and West. An example of how a western city, Colorado Springs, took advantage of this stands out.
Colorado Springs
Ninety miles south of Denver, Colorado Springs’s 1940 population of 37,500 suggested a none-too-prosperous western second/third-tier city. Its economic base, poorly connected to the rest of the nation, rested on extraction/mining and health-based tourism. War offered the city and its business leaders an opportunity to diversify the local economy—by attracting government investment. The chamber and affluent local businessmen raised funds, assembled a 35,000-acre parcel, formed a Chamber Military Affairs Committee and sent a delegation to Washington to lobby for military facilities. They were successful, gaining two bases—Camp Carson (30,000 troops) and a small army air base. Together they injected an estimated $5 million per month into the local economy (Gray and Markusen, 1999, pp. 313–15).
At war’s end, the chamber confronted the issue of if, and how, the local economy could be sustained—if not expanded. As the Cold War degenerated into the Korean “hot” war an opportunity opened up to continue the government’s investment strategy—which the chamber did. Again, successes followed from local initiatives. Not only were the two World War II assets expanded, but two new military-related assets were also acquired—and they were plums. The Air Defense Command (a “hole in a mountain” in which the nation’s defense command center operates) and the Air Force Academy both settled in Colorado Springs. There was intense competition for the Air Force Academy among other cities, but the Colorado Springs congressional delegation was strategically placed.
In 1949 the Secretary of Defense formed a committee on “a general system of education for the Army, Navy and Air Force’; its co-chairs were the presidents of Columbia University (Dwight Eisenhower) and the University of Colorado (Robert Steams); In 1954, when the location was decided, both branches of Congress were Republican—the chair of the Senate Conference Committee was Colorado’s Robert Millikin (also chair of the Finance Committee). Chair of the House’s Committee on Science and Aeronautics (space program) was Colorado Republican John Chenoweth. So, by 1986, an estimated 61,000 people (non-military) were employed at various
Colorado Springs military assets. Equally important, several defense-related industries established a meaningful presence in the area (Loral, GTE, Government Systems, Litton, Martin Marietta and TRW Defense). The city’s population increased by 54 percent in the 1950s, 92 percent during the 1960s and 59 percent during the 1970s, reaching 215,000 in 1980. A major reason for success, Gray and Markusen assert, was the chamber, which cultivated, on a personal basis, relevant military decision-makers— using a recreation spa in which generals and even President Eisenhower bathed, and developing an image of the area’s “military friendliness”: “We have one of the most outstanding military-civilian relationships in the nation” (Gray and Markusen, 1999, pp. 315–16).
WESTERN POSTWAR SUBURBANIZATION
A New Urban Hierarchy
Western suburbs developed in a different time and place than their eastern predecessors. Carl Abbott makes the case that western central cities and suburbs were different from their eastern counterparts. They were characterized by different land use and settlement patterns; they developed different central city–suburb relationships. In broad strokes he observes that:
Over the last half-century [writing in 1990], we have slowly come to realize that Western cities can best be understood as characteristic products of twentieth-century America … as clear expressions of new technologies of movement and communication. They cluster straight-forwardly along their highways. (Abbott, 1998, pp. 123–6)
According to Abbott, the fundamental dynamic that shaped western economic development was the suburban–central city interrelationship that evolved between 1940 and 1970.
The simplest and most basic difference between West and North/Midwest suburbs is that each developed in different time periods, reflecting different transportation modes and different demographics. Suburban autonomy in the eastern United States was apparent after the turn of the twentieth century, and well developed by the twenties. Few western suburbs were major population centers at this time—excepting California coastal cities, which did resemble eastern patterns. Western central cities were located at distances far apart from other competing central cities—and suburbs further away. Close by competing central cities did not inhibit the West’s sprawling, horizontal expansion. Greater distances between central cities and suburbs allowed, if not required, more suburban self-government and autonomy.
Ignoring a few manufacturing suburbs, the typical eastern suburb developed as the more affluent classes wandered across city limits into peripheries to enjoy better housing and live lifestyles reflective of their wealth—leaving behind poorer residents. Not necessarily so with western suburbs. Many got their start from war production housing spilling over city boundaries. The migration of African-Americans to the West was noticeably less (and later) than to the Midwest/Mid-Atlantic. In their place Hispanic minorities, unevenly distributed, settled in great numbers in suburbs (Tucson and Albuquerque, for example). War production factories were built in the suburbs; they never fled from the central city—they were never there. Migrants from the Northeast and Midwest, already accustomed to suburban living and lifestyle, moved directly to suburbs (Abbott, 1981, pp. 35–6). As the population expanded in western states, it was as likely, in some states more likely, to settle in suburbs (often unincorporated) as central cities.
Western suburbs in the period of the West’s greatest growth grew more or less simultaneously alongside their central cities—the former attracting extra-regional/ metropolitan migrants who consciously chose to live in a suburb. Suburban autonomy in this context holds different meaning than found in New York City, Newark, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Chicago, Minneapolis and Detroit. Southwestern and western growth was more or less simultaneous metropolitan-wide growth, not growth flowing from the central city. The different relationship of central city and suburb in western states set a different tone and style to the practice of economic development in these geographies. The central city–suburban relationship was characterized by “metropolitan independence,” corresponding closely to multi-nucleated metropolitan areas dominated by economically and politically independent, largely self-absorbed suburbs resistant to central cities and many forms of regionalism.
Because of “simultaneous growth” western metros developed along polycentric paths—compared to the East. Lots of tension between western central cities and suburbs existed, but after the 1960s it will take on a different character than in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. Western central cities were not “abandoned” to their fate by a feckless sprawl of the affluent, leaving behind “legacy” costs.
The new resident of a suburban ring is typically a migrant from the suburbs of another metropolis, not a refugee from the central city … Has no ties to the core city, no sense of responsibility for its problems, and little need for its services that are duplicated in ‘main street’ of the regional shopping malls. (Abbott, 1981, p. 184)
Instead, Western suburbs developed as cities in their own right, with less tradition, legacy or loyalty to the big-name central city. Suburbs developed institutions, economic bases duplicative of central city institutions; their growth styles (goals and programs) suited their location and electoral personality. “Don’t cry for me,” say Scottsdale, chip-clustered Chandler and university-focused Tempe. I don’t even have to tell the reader where they are—they enjoy their own identity. Most western suburbs did not acquire their critical mass from former central city residents.
Western-style suburbanization did not develop overnight—or easily. During the period presently under discussion (postwar to 1960ish), the reader will see little evidence of it. In fact, just the opposite. At war’s end, suburbs were as likely to be incorporated as unincorporated. But they were populated areas characterized by subdivisions, trailer camps and complexes of cheap bungalows; with unpaved streets, traffic jams, patchy services and cobbled together infrastructure, often with large war production factories nearby. If incorporated, these suburban geographies lacked capacity, and in these years counties, for good and bad reasons, failed to respond. Central cities were the only game in town in the immediate postwar period.
War Production, Public Housing and Western Suburbanization
Wartime growth and new war-related facilities altered the physical landscape of most western cities. Using Portland as an example, the reader can see how one city, overwhelmed by war production dynamics, pushed across its peripheries and turned to private sector “urban renewal” more than a decade previous to the 1954 Housing Act to build, of all things, public housing—beyond its legal jurisdiction. Nobody was clearing slums in Portland’s Vanport—they were creating them. Whatever else, this vividly demonstrates the chaos of war production suburbanization that, in some form (and to some degree), hit all western cities.
Only after growing an estimated 20 percent between 1940 and 1943 (versus 1 percent during the 1930s) did Portland reluctantly recognize the tie between ED and housing. A sustained worker housing crisis badly affected Portland’s shipyard war production, so in September 1942 Henry Kaiser brokered a deal with the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) to build housing on a flood plain outside the city limits. A few short months later (December 1942), a massive housing complex—Vanport (aka Kaiserville)—opened. By 1944 over 9000 units had been built and the title transferred to the federal Public Housing Authority. Vanport was built by a private businessman in partnership with the federal government—bypassing local political authorities and constructing a new suburban municipality.
At its height in 1945 (the complex was flooded and destroyed in 1948) Vanport housed over 40,000 (the nation’s largest public housing project), 40 percent of whom were black—becoming in effect Oregon’s second largest city. At its death in 1948, Vanport was a suburban public housing complex managed by the Portland Housing Authority (Abbott, 1981, pp. 108–9). The 1948 post-flood displacement of black families (over 1000) greatly impacted predominantly black city neighborhoods (North Portland). Today the site is a golf course, public park and home to the Portland International Raceway; it remains outside Portland’s boundaries. Vanport is a dramatic example of a situation that confronted most western cities during the war years. Most cities weren’t as fortunate as Portland, as no flood wiped out the horrendous effects of too-rapid growth.
The core problem created by rapid population and job growth was the ability of the existing governments and institutions to respond quickly. Kansas City’s city manager said: “the essential problem of boom towns was to stretch limited resources to serve an exploding population with almost no lead time for preparation” (Abbott, 1981, p. 101). Housing was an obvious crisis area. Connecting people to jobs, shopping and recreation (roads) was a close second. “Pipes and wires” and fire and police, not to mention public education, were quickly stressed—and when stressed proved to be very expensive to fix. Where would the money come from to deal with all this? Bond referendums were required in most cities, and that usually generated fear of future tax increases. A city could plan all it wanted; installing infrastructure, service delivery and solvent finances were crisis issues of the day. In this atmosphere, ED strategies like attraction and retention got lost in the shuffle. Annexation was the primary strategy response, but it was expensive and, in its own way, disruptive.
Demographics of In-Migration
Population in-migration was a major issue for both Big Cities and Sunbelt cities, but “who” was in-migrating also played a huge role in creating a different policy environment. Great Migration paths certainly reached into southern cities, and a few western cities (Los Angeles in particular). The big spurt in black migration to LA (and Portland) was during the war. Hispanic migration, however, which had been mostly rural before the war, turned decidedly urban after. Again, Los Angeles was the principal magnet, although cities close to the Mexican border also attracted many Hispanic in-migrants. Low-income blacks and Hispanics clustered in low-rent, older neighborhoods, usually (but not always) close to the CBD, as Great Migration newcomers did in eastern Big Cities. When urban renewal came into play, these neighborhoods felt its destructive impact the most.
Outside of LA and other border cities the initial black population base was low, and no matter how spectacular the rate of increase was, absolute numbers and percent of total population remained low—especially compared to cities on the Great Migration path. Race, always an issue, was not the defining characteristic of postwar western population growth. Most in-migrants were white Anglos. The defining characteristics of the Anglo Age of UR in-migration were their youth and unbelievable mobility. The Chapter 1 model introduced “generational cohort” as a dynamic factor driving ED. From the fifties onward, certainly as baby boomers attained what passed for maturity in those years, large numbers left home or went on western summer trips (like studying abroad today). Many stayed and lots eventually came back. In any case, they were constantly on the move.
Studies of individual cities during this time revealed that one-third (or so) of in-migrants stayed at one location less than a year, moving from city to city, city to suburb. Phoenix during the late 1950s had over one-quarter of its population in residence for less than two years, another third less than ten years: “Westerners moved restlessly about their cities, exchanging one home for another almost as easily as they sold and bought cars.” Between 1955 and 1960 about a third of the populations of Seattle and Los Angeles changed homes within their county; between 1965 and 1970 40 percent of San Jose’s population moved within their county (Findlay, 1992, pp. 35–6). As the young moved about, new in-migrants took their places—cities and suburbs pressured by generational cohort in-migration were a perpetual motion machine with large swathes of population essentially rootless without special attachment to home, neighborhood or cities.
Planning proved fruitless in this environment; growth occurred no matter what was or was not done. Western urbanization in this period was described as “arbitrary,” “confused,” “uncontrolled,” “a “random kind of disorder that ‘blighted’ the land and ignored the accepted wisdom about how cities should develop” (Findlay, 1992, p. 46). A Los Angeles planner apparently threw up his hands and simply called it “chaos.” The Policy World and intelligentsia labeled it “sprawl,” blaming it on growth coalitions, real estate developers, the federal government, cars and highways. But, sprawl was more a simple, multigenerational, young adult population boom that overwhelmed local capacity than a deficiency of planners or political decision-makers. Until young in-migrants settled down, order, in the 1960s’ turbulent years, was an uphill struggle.
Moreover, these criticisms ignored the psychological impact of sustained growth and prosperity—at first, people wanted more of it. In the 1950s lots of city councils and mayors echoed the feelings of San Jose’s city manager, who said he wanted his town to be another Los Angeles. This is because of a widespread change in municipal policy systems in both South and West that had commenced in the immediate postwar years. In those early years, city after city was taken over by a business-led coalition of what Abbott calls “neo-progressives” (see below). They stayed in power until the seventies.
Growth and Simultaneous Suburbanization
Between 1940 and 1970 Sunbelt population growth was “explosive.” San Diego increased by 400 percent, Oxnard and Albuquerque 500 percent, Phoenix 800 percent, but Maricopa County only 421 percent. California was the place to go: San Jose shot up by 600 percent, San Bernardino 700 percent and Orange County 1100 percent. Western population growth was uneven. On the low end of the scale, Portland and San Francisco merely doubled. The growth machine, Los Angeles, grew only by 250 percent. Denver grew by 300 percent; the City of Seattle only 44 percent and King County only 129 percent. But, make no mistake, the postwar Sunbelt was in spectacular growth mode—sustained over the three decades.
How Sunbelt municipalities responded to growth varied; but central city growth was simultaneous with hinterland growth. Counties and suburbs benefited from the same growth that propelled central cities. Sunbelt suburbanization was “simultaneous suburbanization,” not the exodus suburbanization of eastern/midwestern Big Cities. It wasn’t so much “decentralization” as “polycentric suburbanization.”
Newly arrived residents … newfound prosperity required housing to accommodate the swelling population. Each major city witnessed the rapid rise of outlying residential subdivision where the homes were newer and the families younger and more affluent … As suburbs grew they attracted commerce and industry which made them less subordinate to central cities. (Findlay, 1992, p. 27)
Even the usual pattern of the poor living in inner-city neighborhoods was reversed in parts of the Sunbelt as a number of Hispanic communities (colonias) sprouted up outside city limits—and with simultaneous suburbanization low-income Hispanics were as likely to settle in suburbs and unincorporated areas as inner cities. The incredible rapidity (and costs) of growth simply made it impossible for central cities to annex on all fronts. Scottsdale, for example, incorporated in 1951 with a population of less than 2000—by 1970 it had almost reached 70,000.
Given that the era’s dominant motif stressed the monocentric central city (and few viable alternatives existed), western central cities filled the suburban vacuum with (1) chamber-led, business-dominated policy systems pursuing growth through boosterism that quickly took the form of massive annexation campaigns; and (2) metropolitan planning—which in most cases went nowhere over the next decade. Infrastructure, water, but also utilities, streets, schools and various services (garbage collection, welfare and the like) were serious problem areas. These put pressure on county government and, over this period, county government acquired a seriousness of purpose and function that exceeded their eastern counterparts. Economic development often fell chiefly to county governments, with a presence maintained at the urban level. For example, the 1956 Arizona Industrial Development Financing Act authorized taxexempt IDBs, allowing suburban municipalities to form industrial development agencies (IDAs) and define, within state law, their own policy of economic development financing. Today, nearly all Arizona municipalities of size possess an IDA. Many were initially created in the mid–late 1970s.
Deconcentrated settlement areas created serious problems in figuring how to provide (and pay for) services and infrastructure new residents required. Each city responded to this infrastructure crisis by “adapting existing governmental forms and creating new institutions within the context of state law … The most straightforward governmental response to the deconcentration of population is … annexation” (Abbott, 1981, p. 50). During the fifties and sixties western central cities annexed periphery areas as a core economic development strategy—their purpose to capture residents so as to install and finance core infrastructure. Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Phoenix, San Diego and San Jose annexed more than 100 square miles between 1950 and 1970. El Paso added over 90 (Abbott, 1981, pp. 50–51). For those who later asserted the chief difference between eastern and western central cities was the latter’s ability to “chase” their population through annexation, this was the time when the chasing was done. By the early sixties, in some cities a bit sooner, the suburbs pushed back and resisted annexation. They did so for many of the same reasons eastern suburbs had pushed back 60–70 years earlier.
By the sixties the suburbs/unincorporated areas resisted central city annexation. In several states, suburbs successfully amended state annexation legislation to allow for residential concurrence in the annexation initiative (Texas, Oregon, California, Colorado and Virginia for example). By the middle 1970s annexation had lost its importance as the central strategy of central cities to cope with growth and provision of services and infrastructure. Service districts were the next vehicle of choice. Service districts, however efficient and fiscally responsible they might be, sustained and even enhanced suburban autonomy and independence. They permitted simultaneous central city and suburban population growth. Consider the San Francisco Bay area (pre-1980 period) in which the combined population of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose (1,553,000 in 1977) was almost balanced by the 1,183,000 residents of 15 suburban cities with populations of 50,000 or more. The four large Denver suburbs of Arvada, Aurora, Boulder and Lakewood held a quarter of the population of metropolitan Denver; and the suburbs of Tempe, Mesa, Glendale and Scottsdale accounted for 30 percent of greater Phoenix (Abbott, 1981, p. 53).
By this time, western metropolitan areas, characterized by annexation-prone central cities, became quickly surrounded by an increasingly independent network of autonomous suburbs, fostered and supported by service districts and urban county government, and intent on preserving self-rule. City-county consolidations, occurring elsewhere during these years,7 did not figure prominently in the West. Moreover, pre-1900 city–county consolidators (Denver and San Francisco for example) did not limit the formation of high-growth suburban jurisdictions: Englewood, Littleton, Northglenn, Wheatridge, Boulder, Arvada, Aurora and Lakewood in Denver’s case.
When GIs returned home what they found was not always pleasing. A new demographic cohort, the Greatest Generation, entered political and economic life—their life forged upon Depression and war shaped their world view as well as future expectations. They had their own ideas about the future, and their own aspirations for economic success—and neither reflected their fathers’ and grandfathers’ images and beliefs. The western home front had changed as well. GIs left a small city and returned to an emerging Big City—of the West. The “GI cohort effect” was felt nationwide, but assumed distinctive forms in western municipalities.
Generational change is only part of the postwar policy system story, however. The infusion of so many new people during the war years, the injection of new firms and industry sectors in the economic base—combined with the stagnancy of the “old order establishment”—demanded new solutions and strategies which were counter to those of the older policy system. A new policy system, with its own goals and values, eventually overwhelmed but did not remove entirely the old policy system. This section reveals the shift from one policy system to another. The new policy system, in general, will survive into the mid-seventies, when it too will undergo its version of generational change and rapid new in-migration.
Our policy model places great reliance on political culture as a filtering and definitional driver of ED policy-making; accordingly, in the postwar West one can watch a political culture coming together, and see its visible effects on ED policy output and goals. Building on this section in future chapters, the history will delve into how these policy system changes produced a version of ED policy different than that found in Big Cities in this period.
The Policy System: Political Leadership and Business Coalitions
It may seem strange to start this discussion with a Washington-based, business-led EDO—the Committee on Economic Development (CED)—but corporate America’s new EDO played an important role in immediate postwar western municipal policy systems. Through a network of local chapters, and supported by CED-member branch firms present in the West, influential businessmen advocated a sub-state policy agenda that stressed “progress,” modernization/reform of public sector capacity, and railed against corruption, machine bosses and parochial jurisdictional leadership unfit “to guide their city into the modern age.”
That latter description fit the older, and very tired, business leadership that dominated many western cities’ political and economic life. This now third- or fourth-generation native business leadership, whose family forebears initially founded and scratched progress and growth out of the western wilderness, had settled into a closed, stagnant, semi-corrupt old boys’ policy system—favoring limited growth, and little change. That ran counter to growth expectations of the young GI business community and the horde of war year residential newcomers.
Electorally pressured, these tired local elites faced another serious threat from new branch firms (many CED members) and their local network of small business supply contracts and jobs. Branch corporate leadership was uncomfortable with tired native business elites that controlled chamber leadership and obstructed their growth plans. Branch business newcomers allied with GI entrepreneurs/startups that pressed hard for municipal growth strategies perceived as favorable to their business prospects. To these young businesspeople, nepotism, no growth and closed networks that the old business order protected needed to be broken.
Young municipal business reformers remained faithful to the principles/reforms of the old City Efficient movement which were also cornerstones of the CED approach:
Their immediate goal was often to update antiquated municipal administrations, and provide a fuller range of city services at lower costs. Beyond the classic Progressive goal of efficiency [reform businessmen] hoped to mobilize public and private resources to build the necessary physical facilities for economic growth. (Abbott, 1998, p. 39)
They advocated for a modern, efficient, honest and open city government; a strong annexation program to capture existing or prospective suburbs; a modernized downtown, highways and airports; new port facilities to accommodate America’s international trade and financial leadership; and were concerned with water access and air pollution (Abbott, 1998, p. 39).
Many western cities (including Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque and a ton of smaller California cities such as San Jose) inherited a postwar sleepy, clubby and mostly closed policy system populated by burnt-out, very comfortable, crony patronage—descendants of the original business booster class. If one wanted slow, to no, growth, these were your guys. Things got hot when the soldiers came home and newcomers moved in after the war: “Aspiring entrepreneurs and professionals and prominent business executives sympathetic to the goals of the National Committee on Economic Development (CED) … stood to benefit directly from a growing population and expanding market” (Abbott, 1998, p. 38). Unable to access the closed old city hall policy system, and at odds with its no-growth tendencies, they gravitated to, and then transformed, chambers into instruments of political and ED change. Between 1945 and 1955 these elements combined, conspired and organized civic action groups—political parties by any name—successfully competed in at-large, non-partisan elections that saturated western cities.
Using Phoenix as an example, future Senator Barry Goldwater broke into politics as its charter government’s candidate for the 1949 city council. His platform included making “city government more efficient at annexing outlying districts and attracting new industry” (Findlay, 1992, p. 21). Business neo-progressives took over city halls, installed growth coalitions and held on for dear life until collapse in the seventies. Once in power they upgraded and modernized city administration (city manager) forms, strengthened planning, budgeting, the civil service and fiscal administration, and promoted lean and efficient management to deliver low-cost (therefore low-tax) city services.
Growth was their middle name, and infrastructure and annexation were their favorite economic development tools. Airports and water, the West being dry, infrastructure were first-order priorities, as well as highways and streets. Proud of their city and the growth it was enjoying, these Abbott-labeled neo-progressives took special pride in their downtown, a driver of growth in itself and a symbol of both metropolitan and regional status and power (Findlay, 1992, p. 31). A succession of annexation initiatives followed. By 1960, 75 percent of Phoenix residents lived in areas that were suburbs in 1950.
Success in 1950s neo-progressive-led annexation drives sowed seeds of future frustration. During the 1960s suburban Scottsdale, Tempe, Glendale and Chandler put the kibosh on Phoenix’s annexation drives.
Mesa boosters energetically pursued both industrial and residential growth. [Mesa] bought up water rights, promoted its downtown, and sought new businesses. Glendale offered a $20,000 bonus to the first citizen that could bring a 100,000 sq. ft. factor to town. Business and civic groups such as the East Valley Partnership, the West Valley Partnership and Phoenix Together gave lip service to regional cooperation, but competed for everything from sports facilities to educational institutions. (Luckingham, 1982, p. 267)
New suburbs such as Del Webb’s Sun City (Arizona) exploited the pervasive demand for suburban lifestyle, On January 1, 1960 Webb opened up six model units for inspection. By the end of the weekend an estimated 100,000 had traipsed through, and nearly 250 homes were sold. After 1961, Phoenix was successful in only one annexation.
So, in western city after city these three elements (newcomer voter, CED branch corporate leadership and young GI entrepreneur reformers) combined into businessman-led “growth coalitions” that rose to power in the late forties and fifties, persisting, with ebbs and flows, through the sixties and early seventies. In some cities these reform movements jelled into more or less formal civic organizations (Phoenix), in others to more erratic political/bureaucratic leadership (Portland). Economic development policy initially focused on annexation/infrastructure/highways/public services to foster growth and consolidate control over the immediate hinterland. Eventually this proved expensive, hard to implement and generated intense opposition in second-ring suburban communities. At that point their strategy shifted to CBD-focused urban renewal—and highways.
Reform policy systems contained many moving parts that did not always mesh well, or that unleashed new forces such as public bureaucracies that had their own agendas (economic development and planning the most obvious, but also water authorities and transportation agencies). The coalitions and civic organizations ebbed and flowed as one might expect due to personalities, competing interests and perspectives and normal political wear and tear. Public sector reforms, including budgeting and planning, installing city manager form of governments were one thing, but more problematic electoral reforms (at-large versus wards and non-partisan elections) crippled local political parties, engendering more personalistic and charismatic tendencies that chipped away at the coalitions’ effectiveness and stability. They also created a policy gap between city government and the increasingly ethnic/racially homogenous low income neighborhoods.
In the 30 or so years these coalitions dominated western municipal policy systems a number of ED strategies, programs and tools were employed. Through the fifties annexation/infrastructure/public services/transportation—and the tools important to them (bonding, eminent domain, planning)—were common. The motivation underlying the strategy reveals a subtle but critical difference from Big City strategies during these periods. Western economic development resembled an earlier movement, the City Beautiful, that stressed a “coming of age,” growth, prestige—and a breaking of the colonial shackles accomplished by their forthcoming entrance into a national urban hierarchy. They were not trying to preserve a central city hegemony, but rather to establish one. They tried to replicate the path Big Cities had followed in earlier decades. They were, after all, trying to become “Big Cities.” The choice, as posed by Carl Abbott, was whether each western city was to “enter the big leagues” or develop into a “sad sack city” (Abbott, 1981, pp. 141–3). East of the Mississippi Big Cities were fighting a totally different battle.
In the section below, selected municipal descriptions of policy system change and ED policy provide some “flavor” and depth to this brief overview. The city of Albuquerque serves as a “typical western second-tier city.”
SNAPSHOTS
In this section, a series of descriptive municipal policy-oriented snapshots will be presented for cities that either did not fit the “typical pattern described in the previous section” or to demonstrate the pull and tugs encountered by western cities in this period. Not every western city is described, but the ones presented offer ideas, a sensitivity apart from abstract generalizations and lay the ground for what will follow in future chapters. Outstanding omissions such as San Francisco, Seattle and Phoenix will be covered in detail in subsequent chapters. The snapshots, I believe, reveal the diversity and variation among western cities. These cities, while cut from the same cloth and while undergoing a similar change in policy systems, will find their own ways, take their own sweet time and wind up on different policy trails. Why they do so is central to an understanding of how American economic development evolved, and makes more valid our belief the policy area is “bottom-up” driven.
Los Angeles
Los Angeles never got the memo outlining how central city and suburbs were supposed to evolve. That didn’t affect its growth. Los Angeles today (3.8 million), is America’s second “world-class,” first-tier city (having edged out Chicago in 1990). In 1940 LA’s population of 1.5 million put it 5th; in 1960 3rd (2.5 million versus NYC’s 7.8 million). During the fifties, Los Angeles grew by 26 percent and in the sixties by 13 percent. In the postwar era, LA flooded across the San Fernando Valley, which acquired the label “America’s Suburb.” The now-infamous Leave It to Beaver TV show (1957-63)— filmed on the Los Angeles Universal seemingly reflecting the Southern California suburban motif—has become the national image of American life in the fifties. Los Angeles ought not to be regarded as a “typical” western city; it has emerged as America’s second “world” city and its relevant comparison is not Phoenix, but New York City or London.
Los Angeles was a twentieth-century growth machine—growth characterized by sprawl, decentralization and suburbs. “Growth machine” was how William Fulton described Los Angeles—that and “fragmented metropolis.” Los Angeles city-builders (people like Huntington, Mulholland and Chandler) were the tip of a small “cartel of powerful interests” that drew from the area’s distinctive midwestern Privatist political culture to form “the most effective growth machine(s) ever created” (Fulton, 2001, p. 7). The dynamos of this growth machine were housing, real estate and elite control over transportation and infrastructure. The mostly unplanned result was a metropolitan area comprised of several counties stretching 100 miles along the coast and 100 miles deep into California’s interior. If ever a western city and suburb was simultaneous in its development, it was Los Angeles.
Fulton describes a Privatist heaven that forged a series of interrelated fragmented cities, counties and unincorporated areas—“a multi-headed beast with no center.” Los Angeles City, with a weak downtown and a series of waterfront economic centers, spread the length and the breadth of the city itself. Commercial strips, a lot deep backed up to sprawling residential neighborhoods, predominated. The economy was an unplanned, uncoordinated masterpiece of diversified gazelles—technology, Hollywood, aerospace, agriculture, international trade, business services—and a robust construction/home-building/finance sector that consumed ever more land for homes, shops and jobs to an endless stream of in-migrants and immigrants. During this era, Disney World opened (1955), and the Dodgers (1958) and Angels (1961) came to town. Smog defined the city.
Fulton, among others, conceived Los Angeles as “the anti-city.” Its residents and its culture were anti-urban—a central city with a suburban mentality and culture. Contained within its boundaries were numerous residential areas that protected their autonomy. With an “inborn mistrust of big government and especially of political machines,” the region was a “plethora of small, self-governing cities … with government close to the people as the norm” (Fulton, 2001, p. 13). Los Angeles area municipal governments traditionally have been weaker and more fragmented than, say, New York City’s. The political structures of the metropolitan region were Progressive reformist. City managers, non-partisan (mostly ward) elections with a strong “Lakewood system” dominated the metropolitan area.8
Area policy systems were heavily impacted by a state-imposed referendum law that carried over to county/municipal levels. Presided over by a semi-weak but highly visible mayor and an incredibly vibrant city council elected by wards in non-partisan elections, politics tended to be neighborhood focused. Day-to-day policy-making, less affected by mayor than council, lent the impression the 15 members were “the mayor of a city the size of Syracuse or Toledo” (Fulton, 2001, p. 45). Elections in a decentralized city of this size were media affairs—driven by money and party affiliation. Independent boards/commissions and city department heads protected by civil service tenure and state regulation dominated municipal administration.
The mayor who presided over the war and early postwar years was progressive Democrat Fletcher Bowron (1938–53) (Sitton, 2005). Like La Guardia, Bowron (a judge) came to power via a fusion party ticket elected by voters wanting change (La Guardia from Tammany), in Bowron’s case a police scandal and corrupt municipal government. Bowron firmly embraced the fortress-military investment strategy and lent his limited powers to acquiring military investment, support of the Los Angeles Port Authority and bond issues that built several cruisers for the Navy. During his era a good deal of the Los Angeles freeway system was built, and he aggressively demanded the internment of Japanese people—and articulated a racist campaign against them— despite his general record as a liberal Progressive.
He aggressively sought New Deal public housing/slum clearance funds (10,000 constructed); this would lead to his defeat in 1953 by a Republican opponent who, in a McCarthyist atmosphere, attacked him as socialist. The city during the fifties was “guided” by a Republican mayor who served two terms. Norris Poulson ran with support from the Los Angeles Times and regional business elites and opposed a Bowron 1953 housing project initiative—but later, after attracting the Dodgers to LA, built a stadium on the site (battle of Chavez Ravine). He continued support for key infrastructure, including LAX, which commenced during his administration, and for enhancement of LA’s port facilities. He also integrated the city’s police department and got yelled at by the visiting Nikita Khrushchev.
Bowron had been the longest-serving mayor (five terms) and today is second to Tom Bradley. From 1961 to the present day, with one two-term exception, the mayor has been a Democrat. Interestingly, from 1938 to 1993, only four men served as mayor.
Portland
Portland did well during the war under an odd alliance of neo-Progressive private sector (and chamber) war production entrepreneurs and New Deal war production/ housing agencies. That nexus was sufficient to overcome a conservative, ethnic-based political leadership, and thrust the city into aggressive war production housing and eventually a public works urban renewal based on a Robert Moses “Portland Improvement” plan. The Improvement Plan displays the configuration of Portland’s policy system, and serves as a good starting point to describe Portland’s postwar behavior.
Business leaders formed a local branch of the CED (July 1943) to counter older, native firms and dominant Portland institutions. Younger private business leaders gravitated to the (CED-led) chamber when it advocated for more aggressive industry recruitment—in opposition to older business leaders and much of the general public (Abbott, 1981, p. 113). Revealing a strong Portland business-led tendency to use planning to confront problems and anticipate the future, these young businessmen formed a public/private group, the Portland Area Development Committee,9 headed by the president of the chamber but dominated by Henry Kaiser.
Kaiser, a native of Portland, in his wartime shipyard travels had come to admire a New York planner/developer, a certain Robert Moses, and thought Portland would benefit from his advice. In 1943 Kaiser pressed Portland leaders to bring Moses in to develop a plan for the city. Moses did not come cheap, and $100,000 from the county, city, port authority and school district had to be raised. Moses arrived in late 1943 and, after ignoring local officials, spent six days in Portland before issuing the “Portland Improvement” which, at root, was a $60 million public works program to “stimulate business and help bridge the gap between the end of the war and the full resumption of private business.”
The plan promised to employ 20,000 workers to build a civic center, sewers, schools, public offices, a new airport and a freeway loop around the business core (Abbott, 1998, p. 37).10 In 1944 the electorate approved $24 million in bonds and taxes to start implementation (mostly for freeways) which over the next decade was carried out. The informal alliance, however, lost considerable steam in the last years of the war. Portland’s politics fragmented badly. Voters, after initially approving bonds/tax increases for Portland Improvement’s 1944 launch, rejected subsequent funding, tax increases and bond referenda in the postwar years.
Kaiser, embracing the CED approach, formed a local largely private EDO, the Area Development Committee, to plan and implement with the city a postwar urban renewal program that remade the city over the next decade or so. The leadership of Portland Improvement over the subsequent decade, however, fell to Public Works Director
William Bowes and Finance Commissioner Ormond Bean.11 Under their leadership Portland turned early to metropolitan planning. Bean, a former chair of the Oregon State Planning Board, consistently linked haphazard sprawl to increased costs for Portland taxpayers.
As early as 1944 Bean, at a meeting of the League of Oregon Cities, drove home the point that “sporadic, scattered and unregulated growth of municipalities and urban fringes has caused tremendous waste in money and resources. Bean called for legislation to create metropolitan planning agencies to provide for “orderly growth and development.” His ally, Bowes, supported him. Bowes chaired a special committee in 1947 that “successfully urged the state legislature to provide for county planning commissions.” Both Bean and Bowes worked closely with Portland’s suburban counties, and by 1952 came within a hair’s breadth of establishing a city/counties single planning board with consolidated staff—a planning commission with authority over three-fourths of Portland’s metropolitan area (Abbott, 1981, p. 172).
After 1956, newly elected Mayor Terry Schrunk’s administration began a CBD urban renewal initiative: a downtown coliseum was built; a modern zoning ordinance approved; and the city separated economic development from planning/public works. In 1958 the Portland Development Commission, intended to be the city’s urban renewal agency, was created through referendum.
Amid this atmosphere, the older CED business elite lost its influence over ED policy. Instead, business reformers turned to charter reform—and that proved a dead end (Abbott, 1981, pp. 122–3). Portland’s postwar flirtation with business/government partnership had never taken root, and quickly gave way to government-led planning and ED—a path common to eastern Big Cities. Portland was a very early urban renewal pioneer, again following the path of northern/midwestern Big Cities—not the western city model.
Oklahoma City
Not many economic developers have a decent-sized lake named after them; Oklahoma City Chamber’s managing director Stanley Draper does. Named by the Oklahoma state legislature in 1967 as “Mr. Oklahoma,” Draper served nearly a half-century with the chamber, almost 40 years as its CEO (1931–69). The tenure may be achievement enough, but through most of his “reign” Draper dominated not only Oklahoma City economic development but its political life as well.
Oklahoma became a state in 1907, with Oklahoma City as its capital. As with most southwestern cities, the city charter reflected ideals of the Progressive municipal charter/home rule era. In 1927 a charter amendment adopted the city-manager government; it has remained so since. In its earliest years, cattle stockyards were the pillar of its economic base. With the 1920s’ discovery of oil, the city’s population took off, doubling from 90,000 in 1920 to 185,000 in 1930, and even managing to grow 10 percent during the Depression decade (to 204,000)—in 1950 it was 243,000 (up 19 percent). Driven out during the Dust Bowl, “Okies” were moving to California, but evidently not from Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma City fit the city-manager pattern nicely. In 1950 the city was “the nation’s most homogenous urban area and one of its most socially conservative.” Journalist John Gunther noted that the city had the highest percentage of native-born whites among all major US cities (during WWII it was the only American city to require all its adult citizens to be tested for venereal disease). “Oklahoma City was also a businessman’s town, with a frontier predilection against governmental activity, a deep-seated distrust of organized labor, and a polite indifference to minorities” (Bernard, 1983, p. 216). The tone and much substance of the city’s politics were set by newspaper publisher/owner of the radio/TV station, “the town’s boss man,” E.K. Gaylord. But “Gaylord did not rule alone”; power was shared with the CEOs of the Kerr-McGee Corporation, the First National Bank, Oklahoma Gas & Electric and our chamber CEO Stanley Draper (Bernard, 1983, pp. 214–16).
The city’s political resemblance to Dallas’s business-dominated, oligarchic policy system suggests that Oklahoma City also shared a Tidewater-like political culture.12 As far as economic development went, Draper was in charge—the mayor and city manager worked out their differences with Draper and “Under Draper, the chamber’s agenda became the city’s agenda” (Bernard, 1983, p. 217). Draper inaugurated the chamber’s industrial recruitment program back in 1920. In that year he attracted the Taggart Bakery (the producer of “Wonder Bread”). Over the next ten years, Draper maneuvered a name change from Oklahoma Station to Oklahoma City; got the state to connect it to the highway system; multiplied the city’s convention business six-fold; and created the area’s first construction “trust” to finance the Stockyards Coliseum.
During the Depression he led construction of the city’s reservoir system. Draper adopted our “attraction of federal investment” economic development strategy. Working with his congressional delegation he garnered the Army Air Corps’ Will Rogers Airport, a maintenance/refueling base (Tinker Field) and the Civil Aeronautics Board’s training school for air traffic controllers (Mead, 2014, p. 329). To accomplish this last feat Draper created the Industries Foundation of Oklahoma (1940) to fund the purchase of land and construction for the federal facilities, acquiring over 1200 acres next to the airport (Mead, 2014, pp. 329–30). Draper also attracted a Douglas Aircraft assembly plant. By 1946 Draper had accomplished more than most—but he had only begun. Hold on until Chapter 15.
Denver
Denver presents yet another variation of a postwar ED policy system, one in which the prewar business elite, although formally displaced from power in 1947, resisted growth policies of the new business reformers until the mid-fifties. The old prewar business elites (the “Seventeenth Street tycoons”) controlled long-time (since 1923) mayor, Ben Stapleton. Their knee-jerk reaction to wartime growth and its associated problems was summarized by Stapleton’s famous comment to a question concerning Denver’s wartime housing crisis: “If all these people would only go back where they came from, we wouldn’t have a housing shortage.”
The old elite prospered from Denver’s prewar economic base, which rested on white-collar government employees working in the numerous regional state/federal government headquarters (in 1948 there were 10,000 government workers), tourism and raw material extraction/export. They feared manufacturing because its pollution threatened the environment and brought unions, and branch plant corporate leadership was unlikely to integrate into the local business culture. It was sufficiently motivated to acquire the Lowry Air Force Base in 1938 and the Buckley Air Force Base in 1943. In 1948 there had been 10,000 federal civilian employees in Denver (Judd, 1983, p. 173).
“It was modern carpetbaggers attracted to Denver by wartime who provided the initial impulses for change.” Outsiders like Elwood Brooks, a bank CEO who supported CBD redevelopment by NYC’s commercial developer William Zeckendorf, were encouraged by outsider Palmer Hoyt’s Denver Post (Abbott, 1981, pp. 124–5). In 1947, a tired and vulnerable Ben Stapleton lost the election to James Quigg Newton—a 35-year-old Yale Law School graduate, former William O. Douglas Supreme Court clerk, and a navy veteran. Calling for change of all sorts, but concentrating on the city’s visibly declining appearance, economic vibrancy and much-despised old-boy cronyism, Newton won and stayed for two terms.
Unable to achieve desperately desired charter reform, Newton’s imported professional “Michigan Mafia” administrators upgraded city hall’s bureaucracy. Change hit the chamber also. By mid-1950 older business elites lost control and the chamber “began to produce booster literature of a sort unimaginable during the 1940s.” The chamber and Colorado Bureau of Tourism (established in 1937) placed advertisements in national magazines “extolling Colorado’s virtues as a vacation spot.” During these years, Colorado’s ski industry was born; by 1975, 30 major ski areas were in operation and dozens of ski equipment manufacturers/wholesalers “sold their wares” (Judd, 1983, p. 172).
In partnership with the business reform mayors, the chamber embarked on several growth initiatives with the state, such as diverting water to the Blue Mountain Reservoir and from Dillon Lake into the city’s water system. They also lobbied to ensure effective access to Eisenhower’s 1956 new Interstate Highway Program. As originally proposed, the Interstate Highway Act stopped dead at Denver, limiting access to and from the West as well as access to Colorado’s interior. Denver’s mayor and governor, working with Eisenhower, were able to obtain funding to build out I-70 to Salt Lake City—a victory for Denver reminiscent of the earlier railroad era. In a final economic development initiative, commencing in the early 1960s, Denver was chosen in 1970 by the US Olympic Committee as America’s sole 1976 Olympics applicant.
While all this was going on, Denver kept annexing 100 small bits of periphery. Between 1941 and 1974 Denver doubled its size through annexation. It did not abandon metropolitan planning, however. But that tool eventually proved not only a failure, but also instigated a profound and intense pushback from its not so grateful beneficiaries. The issue was water and its linkage to annexation. The thorn in the suburbs’ butt was the Denver Water Board. Ever since its 1918 formation, the board had been chintzy in allocating scarce water resources to the hinterland. For a variety of good and bad reasons, the board, appointed by Mayor Newton—reflecting his, the chamber’s and the real estate position—believed supplying suburban areas with water fueled suburban growth.
So in 1948 water was allocated only to those suburbs which in the judgment of the Water Board had adequate zoning and housing codes in place. The resentment of the suburbs, however, grew exponentially during the severe drought of the early fifties. Alleging it was necessary to preserve sufficient water resources for Denver, the Water Board further “blue-lined” water allocations to suburban areas. By 1954–55 the blue-lined suburban areas were rationing water. Suburban counties rejected the joint development of trans-mountain water in 1954, and that forced Denver to go it alone at a jaw-dropping $115 million cost.
The blue-line allocation system was kept in place until 1960. By then, however, several suburbs—Littleton, Englewood, Westminster and Aurora (which joined forces with Colorado Springs instead)—had decided to go it alone and develop their own water. By 1962 the four county Denver metro areas developed ten city water systems (in addition to Denver’s) and several dozen special water districts (Abbott, 1981, pp. 176–7). The legacy of bitterness left by the water fights doomed most of the subsequent efforts to create regional service districts. In 1965, 1966 and 1967 Denver’s attempts to create regional government to administer six services failed in the state legislature.
Denver’s city-suburban break point came in 1973-74. Two laws passed at that time, the Poundstone Amendment and the Boundary Control Commission, cemented Denver’s suburban autonomy. The story behind the Poundstone Amendment offers additional insight. Lobbyist Freda Poundstone reacted negatively when, in 1973, the Denver Supreme Court decided Denver must desegregate schools. The decision presumably drove more Denverites to the suburbs, and raised concerns by suburbanites who perceived themselves in danger of Denver annexation. Poundstone was one of those “concerned” suburbanites. With no political experience, she did her best imitation of Jane Jacobs, and convinced surrounding suburbs and the state legislature to approve legislation requiring voter consent of those to be annexed. Surprisingly, the shock to Denver’s citizens that Poundstone had effectively shut down the city’s expansion forced the citizens to forge a new identity and start their own city revitalization.
Albuquerque: The Typical Postwar Western Policy System
Bernalillo County in New Mexico housed 65,000 residents in 1940, including Albuquerque’s 35,500. Ten years later the county had grown to 146, 000 and the city to 97,000. The war years had been especially kind to Albuquerque. A late-starting railroad town that had not grown dramatically in its first 50 years lived off of alleged virtues such as a TB cure and Route 66 tourism. The war (and Cold War that followed) prompted construction/expansion of Kirtland Air Force Base and the Sandia National Laboratories, as well as specialized weapons development and atomic research nearby. Military-related activities substituted for declining the Santa Fe Railroad as the city’s most important source of economic growth (Rabinowitz, 1983, p. 256). The University of New Mexico also expanded from 1800 students to about 5000 in the 1950s.
Until 1953, Albuquerque was dominated by “Boss” Clyde Tingley, a former governor and New Deal Democrat who served as chairman of the city commission government from 1940 to his death in 1953. Friends with Roosevelt, Tingley garnered federal monies from federal Civil Works and Public Works Administration which he put to use by constructing infrastructure/public works—mostly roads, underpasses, bridges, viaducts and public buildings. Despite the increased military presence, located largely outside city limits at the time, the downtown core, except for a 1939 Hilton hotel, generally deteriorated during the 1940s. Very little wartime housing was constructed, despite the increased numbers of workers and military dependants.
Suburbanization occurred simultaneously during the forties alongside central city growth. In an attempt to capture suburban residents for the 1940 census, the city and chamber launched a Greater Albuquerque campaign—to little effect. The city restricted provision of city services and infrastructure to its outlying communities, and attempted a few small annexations until 1946. In the 1946 election, however, things began to change. The Albuquerque Citizens Committee, a young businessmen’s civic association, captured a majority of the city commission, effectively ending Tingley’s reign—although he still remained on the commission. The middle-class Citizen’s Committee, arising out of Albuquerque’s “Heights” neighborhoods, wanted the prototypical City Efficient and honest municipal government. Joining forces with a separate charter committee, they fielded candidates, raised funds and pressed for a city manager and non-partisan elections. Their 1946 “Better Government” campaign swept into office on a platform of “business growth and municipal expansion.”
It was then that the chamber pressed for the 1946 annexation; state legislation was approved, followed by a series of major annexations: at least 20,000 residents were immediately added when the city tripled in area between 1946 and 1950, with additional annexations after 1950. Post-1950 annexation, unlike that of the 1940s, included largely unpopulated land “at the request of developers who hoped that city services would make their subdivisions more attractive,” prompting a snide comment that apparently there is such a thing as “central city sprawl” (Rabinowitz, 1983, pp. 258–9). Despite 1947 permissive state legislation, Albuquerque did not create a planning department or zoning ordinance until the middle 1950s. Rabinowitz (1983) asserts that pre-1970 land use policy was controlled by developers, “boosters” and their chamber. In 1946 Albuquerque covered 11.6 square miles; by 1960 it had reached 86 square miles.
Annexations were frequently brutal and contentious affairs, fiercely resisted—leaving in their wake an active, fearful ring of suburbs determined to preserve their autonomy against the imperialistic central city (Logan, 1995, p. 104). Under dominance of the Citizens Committee, the city built a number of freeways during the fifties. After 1953, the reformers approved a planning department and adopted the city’s first zoning ordinance; budgetary and fiscal initiatives kept the city’s finances on a sound footing. Whatever its positive features, however, the reformer-driven city hall and chamber “booster” alliance eventually was dubbed “the growth machine” that “hum[med] along contentedly even as resistance began to materialize” (Logan, 1995, p. 105).
Las Vegas
How can economic development deny Bugsy Siegel his rightful place as Las Vegas city-builder? We can’t—1947 is when he started his noble endeavor. True, Las Vegas was around a bit before Siegel arrived. It was “founded” in 1905 (110 acres adjacent to the Union Pacific Railroad) and incorporated in 1911. Its big year, 1931, followed Nevada’s approving casino gambling, extremely reduced divorce residency requirements and the start of Hoover Dam construction: Las Vegas served “the licit and the illicit demands of workers” (Abbott, 1998, p. 70). In 1941 Las Vegas attracted military investment: the Army Air Corps Gunnery School (currently Nellis Air Force Base, home of the Thunderbirds Squadron). In 1940 Las Vegas was the permanent home of 8000 hardy civilian souls.
Thanks to reformer Fletcher Bowron (mayor of Los Angeles) in 1938 “entrepreneurs of vice” got evicted from LA and moved to Las Vegas just “in time to capitalize on the war boom.” Taking over downtown entertainment, they built the first resorts on the Strip south of downtown. Competing with the “neon gulch” of Fremont Blvd, two streets over, were additional “clubs and resorts.” The original theme of this semi-suburban development was “the Wild West”: names like Frontier, Pioneer, El Rancho and Last Frontier “decorated with wagon wheels and cattle horns” characterized Las Vegas’s early city-building. The breakout was Siegel’s 1947 Flamingo Hotel, which competed with similar investments in Havana and Miami. The Flamingo, which “combined the sophisticated ambiance of a Monte Carlo casino with the exotic luxury of a Miami Beach Caribbean resort” (Moehring, 1989, p. 49), changed the image of Las Vegas from a place to gamble while getting your divorce to a legitimate tourist and resort area for families (and gamblers) (Abbott, 1998, p. 71).
It worked fairly well, first attracting weekenders from California, then, after 1960, becoming the “entertainment capital of the world” and a leading convention trade city. The City of Las Vegas accommodated all this with its building of a first-class, city-owned and operated airport as well as a convention center. Direct employment in hotels, motels and resorts more than doubled from 1958 to 1967, and doubled again (to 47,000) by 1980. By the 1970s Las Vegas attracted more than 3 percent of the total convention attendance in the United States. And, by the way, from the 8400 population in Siegel’s Las Vegas, the City of Las Vegas in 1970 was home to 125,000 residents. Today, of course, it exceeds 600,000. How all this fits into the “typical western city” framework I haven’t a clue. I was offered a deal I couldn’t refuse.
Honolulu
Honolulu has been arguably America’s most diverse municipality and an international city. The city’s ethnic variety was set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when sugar kings brought in thousands of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese and Puerto Rican workers. Honolulu was the first, and still is the only, American city in which Asians and Pacific Islanders constitute the majority of the population (Abbott, 1998, p. 92). Hidden from view, however, are descendants of the New England missionaries who set the moral and political tone of the island’s business political culture; and, until its statehood in 1959, constituted a high percentage of its economic and political elite (and the state Republican Party as well). The return of Daniel Inouye and the 442nd Infantry Regiment following World War II, however, set the stage for native Hawaiians to assume political dominance. Elected to the territorial House in 1953, Democrat Inouye in 1959 became Hawaii’s first member in the US House of Representatives. The state has been among the bluest ever since.
It may surprise the reader that in 1940 Honolulu’s population was nearly 180,000—it was a territory that did not fit into conventional economic or political statistics of that time. Large-scale “immigration” into Honolulu’s port of entry began in 1955, jumping from a 1929-54 average of less than 500 per year to 10,700. The obvious source of Honolulu’s growth was the US military and its base at Pearl Harbor. But again, hiding beneath the surface, was a Pacific Rim gateway strategy that linked to its location midway between Asia and the continental US. Honolulu, as early as 1960, called its downtown office core the “Plaza of the Pacific,” and the state formulated and pursued a distinct Pacific Rim economic development strategy as early as 1960. Honolulu’s greatest achievements in tourism and economic development lay outside this postwar time period—in the 1980s. In this era, Honolulu broke the primacy of a military economic base: “Statewide income from the defense industry surpassed income from sugar and pineapples in the 1950s. Tourism, in turn, surpassed defense in 1970” (Abbott, 1998, p. 72). The 1970s were breakthrough years for Honolulu and Hawaii’s tourism industry as commercial air access flourished, and an avalanche of hotels were built. Honolulu by 1970 combined three cities into one: (1) the navy city around Pearl Harbor; (2) the tourist city along Waikiki; and (3) the regional trade and finance center in between (Abbott, 1998, p. 72).
NOTES
- “Survey of Current Business 1941,” US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), https//bea.gov/scb/pdf/1941/ 10841cont.pdf.
- The battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor returned to service after repair in Portland—except, of course, the Arizona.
- Bruce Bissonette, The Wichita 4: Cessna, Moellendick, Beach and Stearman (Destin, FL: Aviation Heritage, 1999); and Jeffrey L. Rodengen, The Legend of Cessna (Ft. Lauderdale, FL: Write Stuff, 2007). Stearman was bought out by Boeing.
- A lyric in a 1942 song by Redd Evans/John Jacob Loeb, later picked up by big-band leader Kay Keyser. The real Rosie (Rosie Bonavitas) was an assembler in a San Diego Convair plant. It became a famous Saturday Evening Post cover page. The idea originated in Canada from Veronica Foster who (in 1941) was “Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl.”
- The Bracero Program (bracero, I’m told, means manual labor) was a series of laws and diplomatic agreements that followed from the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement of 1942 and enacted by presidential executive order. The agreement allowed millions (over 4 million) Mexicans to work, mostly in agriculture, under short-term employer contracts. Because of the Korean War, the program was formally enacted into law in 1951 and continued to its end in 1964 (http://braceroarchive.org/about).
- Los Angeles, Wichita, St. Louis, Seattle, Dallas, Rhode Island, Long Island and Connecticut, Norfolk, Charleston, Boston, Kansas City, Tulsa, Portland, San Diego and San Francisco.
- Baton Rouge (1947), Hampton VA (1952), Newport News VA (1955), Nashville TN (1962), Jacksonville FL (1967), Columbus GA (1970) and Lexington KY (1972).
- The Lakewood system, approved in 1954, allows cities and suburbs to contract with the county for pivotal services such as police, fire, garbage and the like. The unanticipated effect of the Lakewood system is that it facilitated municipal fragmentation, transferring the costs of critical infrastructure and service needs to the urban county. Together with countywide special districts (in LA’s case the Water Authority is a good example), the Lakewood system enabled fragmentation as well as affordable municipal governance.
- The Portland Area Development Committee borrowed staff from the Bonneville Power Authority, the National Resources Planning Board and the Northwest Electric Company.
- Interestingly, the eastern Policy World was critical of Moses’ Portland Improvement Plan. Moses added to the rancor, asserting that “nothing short of a revolution in urban life [would avoid making] this report disappointing to ivory tower planners” because it relied on public works. Dutifully, Martin Meyerson (Harvard School of Design) called Portland Improvement “a grab bag of unrelated projects”, and Christopher Tunnard (author of prominent planning and landscape architecture publications) attacked the plan for its “narrow vision, its negative forecasts about postwar industry, and its neglect of planning for housing, health, community facilities, and other social needs”—in short because it was not a comprehensive plan (Abbott, 1981, p. 115). The reaction to Moses’ Improvement Plan suggests tension within planning which, in relatively short order, will lead Big City economic developers away from planning into their own distinctive discipline–policy area.
- Portland’s de facto economic developer, William A. Bowes, was a Moses disciple and commissioner of the Public Works Department. Portland implemented economic development/urban renewal not through an independent, business-led, quasi-development agency, but by a government department led by Bowes.
- Bernard seems to agree, citing a number of reasons why Oklahoma City citizens “steeped in deference” did little to challenge their rule by a business oligarchy (1983, p. 216).
Ron W. Coan 