Yet while the powerbrokers looked out at the new West from their high-rise office towers in Los Angeles and Houston or their corporate campuses near Seattle and San Jose, others glared back in resentment. At the end of the twentieth century much of the farming, ranching, and mining West remained tied to a cycle of boom and bust. During the period of national economic stagnation that began in 1973 and extended into the early 1980s, the combined effects of tight money and double-digit inflation created the worst depression in western extractive industries since the Great Depression. As the price of commodities fell, mines and lumber mills closed their doors, throwing tens of thousands out of work. Rural westerners by the thousands lost their land. Over the second half of the twentieth century the number of independent western ranchers and farmers fell by half while the size of the remaining operations increased by 125 percent. Farming and ranching became more concentrated and mechanized, and many small operations were priced out. Unable to buy astronomically expensive tractors and other mechanical devices to keep pace with the corporate “factories in the fields,” tens of thousands of farm families left the land. From 1940 to 2010 the percentage of westerners living in rural areas fell from 42 to 10 percent of the total population, a decline of 76 percent. Hundreds of rural counties suffered devastating population losses, and crossroad communities became ghost towns. As the region’s economic profile rose, the rural and urban split widened, creating an opening in the middle ground for track homes and strip malls.
. . .
The people that streamed into western cities and suburbs pushed economic expansion. The West’s population boom began in the early twentieth century, but after World War II the influx was staggering. From 1945 to 1970 more than thirty million people moved beyond the Mississippi, the most significant redistribution of population in the nation’s history. In 1964 California surpassed New York to become the nation’s most populous state, and in the early 1990s Texas pushed into the second spot. Metropolitan areas experienced the greatest growth. The numbers are stunning. Between 1940 and 2010 the proportion of westerners living in urban areas jumped from 48 to 90 percent, making the West the most urban region in America. Of the nation’s twenty-five largest metro areas in 2015, twelve were in the West. Such growth is predicted to continue. According to the Census Bureau’s projections, over the next few decades six of the ten fastest-growing states will be in the West.
Cities reordered economic relations. Western cities traditionally acted as funnels for exporting extractive commodities (grain, meat, metals, lumber) and importing manufactured goods. In the nineteenth century, Chicago and San Francisco served as gateways between western resource regions and the industrial and financial centers in the East. But in the second half of the twentieth century, urban growth broke free of the countryside. The extractive economy became less significant than urban manufacturing and service industries. As geographer John Borchert has argued, the rapid growth of western cities in the postwar period cannot be explained simply by connections with the hinterland. Rather, intermetro-politan links account for the development. The cities bolstered one another, and instead of a source of raw materials, the hinterlands became drive-by and flyover zones, wastelands to get through or wonderlands to visit on holiday.5
WESTERN CITIES, 1990
What once captured imaginations as a vast region consisting of half the continent now might be better viewed as a series of metropolitan regions—city-states—with large dependent hinterland districts. Imperial Texas centers on the Houston–Dallas–San Antonio triangle and dominates a huge region that extends from the Gulf coast to the oil fields of Oklahoma, from the cattle range of the southern plains to the industrial transborder zone encompassing the twin cities of Brownsville–Matamoros and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez. The Pacific Northwest, an urban empire with a virtual capital at Seattle, includes Washington, much of Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, pulls in Alaska, and encompasses cross-border ties with Vancouver and trade with Asia. The granddaddy of western urban empires is Greater California, based at Los Angeles, the largest and most diversified urban economy in the nation, with gross revenues totaling $575 billion in 2015. The gravitational pull of the southern California economy swept other urban systems into its orbit, including San Francisco, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Portland, and Honolulu.
Busy harbors on the Pacific and Gulf coasts helped launch Seattle, L.A., and Houston. The landlocked metropolis of Denver was for years subordinate to Chicago until the development of air transport in the final decades of the twentieth century. Denver International Airport, opened in 1995, became the focus of hopes for the city’s rise as hub of a major metropolitan region, the Interior West. Its traditional economic strength was in the export of basic commodities (grain and meat, minerals and coal). But the airport stimulated the production of high value, time-sensitive products shipped by air cargo to domestic and international markets. The Denver metro region added thousands of highly skilled positions in aerospace, telecommunications, and finance, and job growth stimulated migration into the region. From 1990 to 2010 the population along Colorado’s Interstate 25, connecting the Front Range cities and suburbs of Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Denver, and Greeley, grew by an astounding 425 percent.
Residents of the West’s large metro regions identify most strongly with their local communities, their urban cores, and their states, for that’s where the political action is. Sometimes they identify as natives of multistate regions, like the Rockies or the Pacific Northwest. But there is little salience for them in identifying as “westerners.”
. . .
How people lived in these new megalopolises mattered just as much as their geographic location. The space that postwar Americans seemed to care about most was the expanse stretching from their front door to the curb and from their sliding-glass patio door to the backyard fence. The suburban plot became cosmic center for the postwar generations. For many, the allegiance to cities, regions, and even the nation grew from their attachment to the “good life” these spaces represented. While suburban development occurred across the nation, the association of detached homes surrounded by swaths of manicured lawn as the foundation of a triumphant “lifestyle” emerged from the West.
The search for open space, for a freer, cleaner, less encumbered life, especially in an appealing climate, drove the West’s urban growth. Most of the searchers landed in the Sun Belt, a place-name that originated among wartime planners who sought to locate the majority of the military’s training facilities in what they called the “sunshine belt.” The enormous swath of arid country stretching from Texas to southern California became the postwar destination of millions of Americans, and almost overnight there appeared thousands of tracts of detached homes, each framed by ample lawns with clusters of palm, avocado, or jacaranda trees and perhaps a backyard swimming pool.
The best known Sun Belt mecca was southern California. “More than anyplace else,” writes historian Kenneth T. Jackson, it “became the symbol of postwar suburban culture.” Southern Californian developers mass produced islands of middle-class satisfaction. Builders moved beyond the innovations of Henry E. Huntington in the early century to consolidate subdivision, home construction, and sales into a seamless operation. In the late 1930s they devised the techniques of tract construction, in which specialized teams of laborers and craftsmen moved sequentially through the project, grading, pouring foundations, framing and sheathing, roofing, and completing the finishing work. With the boom in wartime industry, developers rushed to meet an enormous demand for housing, subsidized by federal loans and income tax reductions for home mortgage interest. Sunshine, tract homes, and easy credit: these were the ingredients of the postwar real estate boom. Development intensified beyond all experience. Southern California sprawled. Builders extended their projects in successive rings outward from central L.A., bulldozing citrus groves and walnut orchards to make way for housing subdivisions, factories and offices, shopping centers, and freeways. Instead of a symptom of economic expans
ion, homebuilding became a source of growth. Both developers and home buyers basked in the glow. During the 1950s profits in southern California homebuilding averaged an impressive 21 percent annually, while the steady inflation of real estate prices turned a generation of homeowners into speculators. Buy a bungalow, sit back, and watch its value grow faster than any savings from hard labor.6
Dozens of “instant cities” appeared, places like Lakewood, south of Los Angeles, where housing for seventy-seven thousand sprouted overnight from former bean fields. Critics point at such subdivisions as development gone mad, but places like Lakewood were in fact the result of careful planning. Located near several aerospace plants and including a huge shopping mall (one of the first in the nation), Lakewood was intended to be a complete community. Rather than establish their own police, fire, and other public services, Lakewood residents contracted with Los Angeles County to provide them, enabling them to keep property taxes low. The “Lakewood Plan” served as the model for numerous other developments, essentially forcing the general county taxpayer to subsidize these middle-class enclaves. And like nearly all other southern California subdivisions, Lakewood’s developers insisted on “restrictive covenants” that excluded all “non-Caucasians” from ever buying a home there. Racial exclusion was part of the plan.
Southern California, wrote journalist Carey McWilliams, became “the first modern, widely decentralized industrial city in America.” In just twenty years the citrus groves of Orange County, southeast of Los Angeles, were transformed into one of the world’s major metropolitan systems, with an industrial and service economy that by the end of the twentieth century was producing goods and services worth sixty billion dollars annually, equivalent to the economy of Argentina. The vast area from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border, the coast to the mountains, was converted into the nation’s largest metropolis. The California dream sprawled across the land.7
The intersection of San Vicente and Fairfax Avenues, Los Angeles, 1922 (top) and 1966 (bottom). The Spence Air Photo Archives, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles.
Families delighted in the opportunity to own their own detached house and yard on a cul-de-sac miles from the central city. But the shadows grew with the subdivisions. Abandoned inner cities, polluted air, and congested freeways alarmed onlookers. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Denver were a few of the cities that attempted to avoid L.A.’s sprawl (with local groups vowing “Not L.A.”), but they produced more grumpy proclamations than compelling alternatives. Sprawl turned suburbanites into road warriors. A 1999 national study of “road rage” found that Sun Belt metro areas led the country in driving deaths associated with speeding at more than eighty miles per hour, tailgating, failing to yield, or yelling and gesturing lewdly to other drivers. An official of Riverside County in southern California spoke of the frustration of commuters: “Your family is 40 miles away and you’re driving one or two hours to get home after putting in 8 to 12 hours on the job, and you’re tired and hungry, and you’re worried about getting your kids to soccer or keeping the appointment with your child’s teacher, or you just want to spend some quality time with your family. But you’re stuck in traffic.” What good was a private fiefdom if the hours spent rolling slowly behind an eighteen-wheeler rivaled the hours spent enjoying the master suite or the granite countertops?8
It didn’t necessarily have to end this way. Through some thoughtful planning, for instance, Portland, Oregon, bypassed some of the problems associated with sprawl. In 1973 leaders struck at the heart of the problem and drew a line around their city—within that boundary there would be high-density settlement, outside it, low-density development. Jobs, homes, and stores were forced into a compact area, catering to pedestrians and served by popular light transit, buses, and fewer cars. The downtown freeway was torn up, a park put in its place, and parking restricted to designated areas. Expansionists predicted economic calamity—disappearing jobs, decreased sales, and declining property values. But in fact all soared. “We have been careful stewards of the land and have fought to protect our natural resources against the urban sprawl that has plagued almost every other metropolitan area in this country,” said one planner. A number of other western cities are attempting to emulate Portland’s success.9
Suburban sprawl, congestion, and overdevelopment were not just western problems, of course. In the postwar period subdivisions ate up the countryside on the edges of every major American city. In accounting for this trend, most histories begin with Levittown, the famous Long Island subdivision that opened in 1947, but in fact Levittown was built on the model pioneered by southern California builders (including racial exclusion). Not only western construction techniques but western home styles went national after the war.
Advertisement for tract homes in Los Angeles, featuring “The Rancho” model, 1042. Westchester/Playa Del Ray Historical Society.
Although not everyone moved west, millions looked forward to living in a western house. The classic house of the postwar building boom was the ranch, a domestic style that originated in California between the wars, particularly in the work of San Diego architect Cliff May, who was inspired by nineteenth-century haciendas, with their rooms opening onto wide porches and interior courtyards. By the early 1940s the basic design began showing up in architects’ plan books. “The style that had captured the attention of the American public is the Ranch-House,” wrote the authors of a homebuilder’s guide in 1942. The very name evoked myth. “When we think of the West,” they mused, “we picture to ourselves ranches and wide open spaces where there is plenty of elbow room.” The ranch house sought to capture this feeling with its horizontal orientation: low-slung roof, rooms flowing one into the other, picture windows and sliding glass doors inviting the residents outdoors to the patio (another western loan word) and barbecue grill. The ranch house, writes historian Thomas Hine, “conjured up powerful dreams of informal living, ideal weather, and movie-star glamour.” At Levittown ranches commanded a 20 percent premium over Cape Cods, although both were based on the same compact floor plan.10
Americans bought the ranch and filled it with many things western. After the war Levi’s became the everyday choice of young Americans from coast to coast. By the 1980s not only jeans but western shirts, belts, boots, bandanas, and even Stetson hats were fashionable. Western clothing, writes cultural critic Michael L. Johnson, was “portable Western atmosphere, identity, transWestite statement.” Meanwhile country and western music went urban and national, and by the 1990s “hat acts”—performers such as Garth Brooks and Dwight Yoakam—sold more CDs and packed more stadiums than rock stars. A country ditty might play in the background of television commercials for pickup trucks and all-wheel-drive SUVs—heavy-duty contraptions that were basically trucks with lids (and because they were classified as trucks, they were exempt from federal fuel efficiency regulations). Rather than bales of hay and spools of barbed wire, middle-class Americans hauled their kids (the nongoat kind) in farm-grade equipment. Epic names taken from the West gave these poor transportation decisions a cultural free pass. Taking a cue from the movies, commercials for Durangos and Dakotas, Comanches and Cherokees frequently featured the vehicles driving through the splendors of Monument Valley on the Navajo reservation. Consumers bought nature, freedom, and self-sufficiency along with their gas-guzzlers.11
. . .
American drivers parked three-ton symbols of western power in their garages at the same time as American voters expressed a preference for western power brokers on their presidential ballots. Consider the ten presidents who served from the end of the war to the end of the twentieth century—six were westerners. Harry Truman was born and raised in Independence, Missouri, the jumping-off place for the Santa Fe Trail, and Dwight Eisenhower grew up in the former cattle town of Abilene, Kansas. Some might object that Missouri wasn’t especially western by the time Truman reached the White House or that Kansas had little to do with Eisenhower’s career. But being pe
rceived as coming from the outskirts of national power helped both men, and the outsider status, real or perceptual, runs through every presidential candidacy since the rise of the United States as a superpower. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore played up their southern roots, while Barack Obama, who grew up in Hawaii, launched his presidential campaign in Springfield, Illinois, to accentuate his Lincoln ties. A frontier rail-splitter as well as a freer of slaves, Abraham Lincoln underscored the multiple peripheries from which Obama emerged.
Texan Lyndon Johnson had been one of the key players in pushing the New Deal programs of economic development, and George H. W. Bush made his reputation as an oil entrepreneur in the postwar boomtown of Houston. Likewise Richard Nixon’s political career paralleled the ascent of his native southern California, and Ronald Reagan was California politics incarnate. George W. Bush presided over the Texas Rangers baseball team before his stint as governor of the Lone Star State. Add to this list of the names of western also-rans: Henry Wallace of Iowa, Barry Goldwater and John McCain of Arizona, George McGovern of South Dakota, Ross Perot of Texas, and Robert Dole of Kansas. Of the twenty-six major party candidates who stood for election between 1948 and 2012, thirteen hailed from the West. Even Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, rose to national prominence when he took over the management of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City after a bribery scandal. His leadership in that crisis as well as his Mormon faith connected him to the West. And for most candidates, a vague connection and the wearing of a cowboy hat at strategic campaign events was enough.
The American West Page 45
