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.