Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics

Politics and Culture in Modern America

by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

Few Sunbelt cities burned brighter or contributed more to the conservative movement than Phoenix. In 1910, eleven thousand people called Phoenix home; now, over four million reside in this metropolitan region. In Sunbelt Capitalism , Elizabeth Tandy Shermer tells the story of the city's expansion and its impact on the nation. The dramatic growth of Phoenix speaks not only to the character and history of the Sunbelt but also to the evolution in American capitalism that sustained it. In the 1930s, Barry Goldwater and other members of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce feared the influence of New Deal planners, small businessmen, and Arizona trade unionists. While Phoenix's business elite detested liberal policies, they were not hostile to government action per se. Goldwater and his contemporaries instead experimented with statecraft now deemed neoliberal. They embraced politics, policy, and federal funding to fashion a favorable "business climate," which relied on disenfranchising voters, weakening unions, repealing regulations, and shifting the tax burden onto homeowners and consumers. These efforts allied them with executives at the helm of the modern conservative movement, whose success partially hinged on relocating factories from the Steelbelt to the kind of free-enterprise oasis that Phoenix represented. But the city did not sprawl in a vacuum. All Sunbelt boosters used the same incentives to compete at a fever pitch for investment, and the resulting drain of jobs and capital from the industrial core forced Midwesterners and Northeasterners into the brawl. Eventually this "Second War Between the States" reoriented American politics toward the principle that the government and the citizenry should be working in the interest of business.

Genres: History, Politics, Economics, American History

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 9, 2013

About the author

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer has written about labor, politics, and education for the Washington Post, HuffPost, and Dissent. Author of Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics, she is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago.

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shermer recounts the story of Barry Goldwater and his generation of business conservatives in Phoenix, Arizona. These were individuals who relied fundamentally on federal infrastructure investments from the New Deal, while rejecting its high taxation and commitment to labor rights, in order to transform a region once entirely dependent on agriculture and extractive industries into a booming, sprawling industrial hub. Favored policies included regressive taxation and "right-to-work" laws in order to promote a more favorable "business climate" for corporations seeking easier profits than they could get in the highly unionized East and Midwest. I learned from this book that the most infamous postwar labor law, Taft-Hartley, was actually passed largely in order to preserve the business advantages of "Sunbelt" Southwestern states like Arizona by allowing states to pass "right-to-work" laws.

This is a history that deserves a lot more attention, since these individuals have been rightly fingered as the precursors of post-1979 neoliberal politics. Unfortunately, Shermer's narrow focus doesn't do it much justice. She seems mainly preoccupied with reciting the minutiae of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce's meetings and propaganda, rather than more deeply exploring the specific corporate practices of investors in Phoenix (such as General Electric, Motorola, Sperry Rand, etc.), the development patterns of the city (i.e. sprawl), or even the ideology of Phoenix's "booster" class (though there are a few brief, intriguing interludes, such as her discussion of banker Walter Bimson's love of financial deregulation and his idea that it democratizes credit; or of Goldwater's paternalistic approach to his own department store business). The book becomes extremely repetitive and thin; Shermer's constant repetition of the phrases "Chamber men", "rainmakers", "grasstops", and "boosters" becomes irritating. A better title for this book might have been "Sunbelt boosterism", though of course this would not allow it to sell as many copies.

As additional quibbles, Shermer also plays it fast and loose with theoretical terms: she calls her subjects "neoliberal" even though they did not self-identify as such and did not articulate a fully formed neoliberal ideology; and she insists that pre-New Deal Arizona was a "colonial" region due to its dependence on raw materials production -- despite the total absence of legal institutions designed to exploit the region as a whole and retard its development and free competition. (Racial segregation applied to Black and Latino residents was certainly of a colonial nature but that is an entirely different issue). Ultimately this book looks like an attempt by an academic to Say Something about an issue that was trendy at the time, even though she doesn't have much to say. I had hoped it would say more about the connection between its subject and neoliberalism since it is relatively recent, but books like this are proof that newer is not always better.

[Gina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this for class. I was not familiar with the sunbelt, but the rise of the sunbelt especially phoenix was interesting. I had to read another book for class this week also, so that one I just skimmed but for those interested it details more of the entire sunbelt it is called "From Cottonbelt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development and the Transformation of the South 1938-1980." If anyone is interested.