Western economic development into the twenties

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

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

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

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

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

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

“YOU AIN’T IN PHILADELPHIA NOW, DARLING”

The Golden Age of Building Cities

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

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

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

Carson City NV 4229 to 2100 (oops)

Tulsa OK 0 to 1390

Oklahoma City 0 to 10037

Austin TX 11,013 to 22,258

El Paso TX 736 to 15,906

Phoenix AZ 1708 to 5544

Albuquerque NM 0 to 6238

Tucson AZ 7007 to 7531

Boulder CO 3069 to 6150

Provo UT 3432 to 618

Wichita KS 4911 to 24,671

Topeka KS 15,452 to 33,608

San Diego CA 2637 to 17,700 Tacoma WA 1098 to 37,714.

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

But then there was Salt Lake City 20,768 to 53,531; Seattle WA 3533 to 80,671; Portland OR 17,577 to 90,426; Los Angeles 11,183 to 102,479; Denver 35,629 to 133,859; and San Francisco 233,959 to 342,782. A few cities did capture a lot of migrants in the pre-1900 period.

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

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

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

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