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).
Ron W. Coan 