The last resort: Tourism, growth, and values in twentieth-century Arizona Item Type text; Thesis-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Klein, Kerwin Lee, 1961- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 11/10/2021 00:13:13 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/291521 INFORMATION TO USERS The most advanced technology has been used to photograph and reproduce this manuscript from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the qualify of the copy submitted. 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Contact UMI directly to order. University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 1341830 The last resort: Tourism, growth, and values in twentieth-century Arizona Klein, Kerwin Lee, M.A. The University of Arizona, 1990 Copyright ©1990 by Klein, Kerwin Lee. All rights reserved. U MI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 THE LAST RESORT: TOURISM, GROWTH, AND VALUES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARIZONA by Kerwin Lee Klein Copyright © Kerwin Lee Klein 1990 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 19 9 0 2 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This thesis has been submitted in partial fullment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgement of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR Thi^, thesis has been approved on the date shown below: yA ^ /o - Douglas R. Weiner Professor of History 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A disclaimer: this study is not intended to be a comprehensive economic history of tourism in Arizona. My primary interest is in how individuals and social groups have conceived and described a particular region. The tourist, an individual traveling for pleasure, offers a unique perspective on the place called Arizona. A great number of people have facilitated this idiosyncratic scholarly tour. Thanks are due to Douglas Weiner, Paul Carter, and Richard Shelton, the members of my committee who supervised my itinerary and were kind enough not to reroute me to some less congenial destination. Many other individuals read all or part of this manuscript and offered helpful critiques: Rob Buffington, Larry Evers, Paul Hirt, Oscar Martinez, Michael Meyer and Jack Remington. Harwood Hinton and Bradford Luckingham provided valuable research suggestions. I am especially grateful to Mary Sue Pass£-Smith, Gloria Duran, and Donna Watson for their assistance in overcoming the logistical obstacles. I hereby absolve each and every one of them of any responsibility for defects in the finished product. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 6 INTRODUCTION 7 CHAPTER l: PULLMANS SOUTHWEST 25 I. The Genteel Tradition 28 II. The Garden, the Desert, and the Border 43 III. The Freedom to Drive 62 CHAPTER 2: FRONTIER PLAYGROUND . 70 I. The House of Mystery 73 II. See Arizona First! 83 III. Conserving the Covered Wagon 94 IV. To Preserve and to Profit. 108 CHAPTER 3: AUTOMOBILITY 117 I. Roads to Romance » 117 II. The Business of Vice 134 III. The Three 'T's 144 QHAPTER 4: FORKING THE NEW DEAL BRONC 154 I. Salesmen of Knowledge 155 II. A Real Pow-Wow 172 III. Old Mexico, New Industry 180 IV. Frontier Days Are Here Again 191 V. Host to a Great Nation 199 CHAPTER 5: A FRONTIER OF COMFORT 207 I. A Little Country Journal . 208 II. Ivory Towers 211 III. Footloose and Fancy Free 225 IV. The Consumption Frontier 243 V. The Producing Consumer 251 CHAPTER 6: A GREAT FRONTIER 253 I. The Freedom to Golf 253 II. Islands of Socialism 271 III. The Border Feeling 281 IV. Longhorns of a Dilemma 292 V. Poodles West 300 REFERENCES 301 5 ABSTRACT In 1950s Arizona, manufacturing and tourism replaced mining and agriculture as the leading sources of revenue in the state. Yet the images of Arizona found in the popular media emphasize rural vistas and rugged individualism. Arizona's success as a consumer commodity is based on the endurance of stylized "frontier" images. The endurance of these images, apart from their popularity with affluent Anglo-American consumers, rests on Arizona's preservation of cultural landscapes associated with the mythic past: the public lands, the Indian Reservations, and the Arizona-Sonora border. Boosters and consumers alike have emphasized the cultural and environmental differentiation that these borders or frontiers are seen as protecting. Since consumer preconceptions of Arizona are as varied as the consumers themselves, this celebration of difference poses difficulties for Arizona's pluralistic society. 6 INTRODUCTION Arizona, the sandcast cowboy buckle of the Sunbelt, is the second fastest growing state in the nation. Its most important industries are manufacturing and tourism. Most Arizonans live in urban environments.1 Yet Arizona is frequently described as a "frontier" state, part of America's new settlement frontier. Consider the judgment of political commentator George F. Will who observed in 1990 that "Around about 1890, historian Frederick Jackson Turner noted, America's frontier closed. But word of that event has not percolated through to Arizona where the West is still wild."2 When the implications of the "Sunbelt" growth of the post-World War II era first gained widespread media attention in the 1970s, Kirkpatrick Sale analyzed the region's development and declared it a "cowboy economy." Sale also invoked the memory of Frederick Jackson Turner and declared that the Sunbelt "is a society which is still close to the frontier traditions."3 Kevin P. Philips is ^Arizona Statistical Review. (Phoenix: Valley National Bank of Arizona, 1988) 2, 8; Charles Sargent, ed., Metro Arizona (Phoenix: Biffington Books, 1988), 10. For a more detailed examination of growth in Arizona, see Bernard Ronan, ed., Arizona's Changing Economy; Trends and Prospects (Phoenix: Commerce Press, 1986. Katherine M. Albert, et. al., eds., The Dynamic West: A Region in Transition. Westrends, Western Region: The Council of State Governments, 1989, provides a larger regional perspective. 2George F. Will, "Arizona Gives 'Conservatism' its Own Twist," Arizona Daily Star January 28, 1990. 'Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (New York: Random House, 1975), 18-19, 72- 73. generally credited with popularizing the phrase "Sunbelt" and was the first to recognize the political significance of the Southwesterly post-war population shift. Philips, campaign employee for Richard M. Nixon in 1968, was brutally frank in his evaluation of the cultural region his candidate hoped to mobilize: "The Sun Country is America's new settlement frontier, and like other frontiers of the past, its politics are nationalistic, anti-intellectual and ethnocentric."4 How deep go the roots of the migration that produced the "frontier urban society of modern Arizona with its air-conditioned suburbs, retirement communities, and irrigated golf courses? How to reconcile the apparently conflicting images of frontier and suburb, Wild West and New West, desert and metropolis? Following the tourist, who was and is both consumer and creator of region, through the first six decades of the twentieth-century provides some clues as to the how, what, and why of modern frontier Arizona. If Arizona remains a "frontier" state, it 4Kevin P. Philips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, N. Y. : Arlington House, 1969), 442. Important precursors of Philips's work include Morris E. Garnsey, America's New Frontier: The Mountain West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), and Neil Morgan, Westward Tilt: The American West Today (New York: Random House, 1961). "Sunbelt" is itself a somewhat problematic term. For recent scholarly discussions see Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), and Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice, eds., Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth Since World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983) Also valuable is the prefatory essay to Gene Gressley's The Twentieth-Century American West: A Potpourri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977), 1-30. Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982), see the rise of the "New West" through a variant of C.