Chapter 51
O that the desert were my dwelling place!
—Byron, Childe Harold
WE ENTER now still another new and altogether distinctive American world, that of New Mexico, Arizona, and the purple desert flowing endlessly under lonely stars, and once more we can note the illimitable opulence of the United States, its fabulous variety and range. This book is now something like five hundred thousand words long. It might easily have been much longer. And yet, nearing the end, we still find ourselves confronting new and singular phenomena, we still have to trace the outlines of another new, fresh, and vital American region.
Perhaps it is fitting to conclude this tour with New Mexico and Arizona because they are at once the oldest American states and the newest. Santa Fe has been a capital for three solid centuries, and Arizona has known white men since 1539. The village of Oraibi, in the Hopi country, is believed to be “the oldest continuously inhabited community in the U.S.” But New Mexico was only admitted to the union on January 6, 1912, and Arizona on February 14, 1912; Arizona is thus the youngest American state by 39 days. For a time the two wanted to come in together as a single state.
Now having completed a full circle, we are back in the West again. This means, as we know, open spaces, friendliness, a lively tincture of political radicalism, sagebrush and cattle culture and the most lordly scenery known to man, colonial economy, dry farming, Indians, absentee capital, and, above all, the politics of water.
New Mexico and Santa Fe
New Mexico has an austere and planetary look that daunts and challenges the soul.
—Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant
It looks rather like Nevada, but is higher, ruggeder, more dramatic. Half the mountains seem to have their tops blown off. The state is the fourth biggest in the union—it is almost three times the size of New York—and the fifth most thinly settled. It has only 531,818 people, less than single cities like Buffalo or Pittsburgh, and the density of population is one of the lowest in the country, 4.4 to the square mile.
The foundation of New Mexican life and economy is, in a word, sunshine. True, there are mineral deposits (though nothing comparable to those of Arizona) and the livestock industry is important, but basically the state lives on its high, dry, sunny climate. The crisp exhilarating sunshine brings tourists in. Also this has contributed considerably to political leadership, in that so many New Mexicans who have risen high came out originally for their health. The state is more or less run by “lungers.” For instance the late Bronson Cutting, one of the ablest senators the country has had this century, arrived in New Mexico on a stretcher. A great many doctors, dentists and so on in the state are, incidentally, patients who have recovered from tuberculosis. Cured by New Mexico, they now cure others.
The other signal uniqueness of New Mexico is racial background. There are three cultures here—Anglo-American, Spanish, Indian—and it is the only bilingual state in the union. English and Spanish are official languages, the constitution was ratified in both, and until recently there had to be interpreters in the legislature; to this day the courts and county offices in the “native” districts have interpreters, and legal notices must be posted everywhere in both tongues. The white population is roughly 63 per cent Anglo, 37 per cent Spanish; in addition there are about
50,000 Indians. This word “Anglo” is not used, so far as I know, anywhere else in the United States; it means people of North American stock in contradistinction to the Spanish and/or Mexicans, who are commonly called “natives.”
I looked at a plaque on the low adobe wall:
EL PALACIO REAL
FORTRESS AND CASTLE BUILT BY ORDER OF THE
SPANISH CROWN, 1610-1612
SEAT OF GOVERNMENT UNDER THREE FLAGS
SPANISH, MEXICAN, AND AMERICAN
FROM 1610 TO 1910
THE RESIDENCE OF OVER 100 GOVERNORS AND CAPTAINS GENERAL
THE OLDEST PUBLIC BUILDING IN THE UNITED STATES
Also this dusty venerable building in Santa Fe with its squarely arched colonnades was for twelve years (1680-1692) the seat of government of the Pueblo Indians, and for a few days in 1862 a headquarters of the American Army of the Confederacy.
Indeed no city in the country is more heavily suffused, more choked with historical association, from the days of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado to the days of Billy the Kid, “who was captured by killing,” than Santa Fe. It was founded in 1609, and its first name was La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco; it is “the oldest capital within the boundaries of the United States.”1 Even if Santa Fe, the town, had no great interest in itself, it would be unmatched in flavor if only because it was the western terminus of one of the most remarkable of all American highways—the Santa Fe Trail that stretched across the continent from Independence, Missouri, with almost arrogant romanticism.2
A famous anecdote is told of William Butler Yeats. Asked to define a literary movement he replied, “A literary movement consists of two writers in the same city who hate each other.”
The analogy does not apply to New Mexico strictly speaking, but both Santa Fe and Taos to the north are famous for their literary and artistic colonies. John Sloan, Victor Higgins, Oscar Berninghaus, Robert Henri, George Bellows, Randall Davy, Gina Knee, have all lived or live in the vicinity. The Harwood Foundation in Taos makes a colorful focus for the work of many others. As to writers the Santa Fe region has produced a literature which few areas in the country can match—with works by Mary Austin, D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke, John Gould Fletcher, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Haniel Long, Harvey Fergusson, Paul Horgan, Eugene Man-love Rhodes, Oliver La Farge.
That New Mexico, which has given life to art from ancient Indian rain dances to a story like Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away,” should also have given birth to the atomic bomb, is perhaps an irony that measures the gamut of our civilization. As everybody knows the first explosion of the bomb took place south of Albuquerque on the remote and inaccessible Alamogordo military reservation; previously it had been put together at the secret workshop made out of a boys’ school at Los Alamos, near Santa Fe. This is where Dr. Oppenheimer had his tremendous laboratory. When I visited Santa Fe a few months before the first test of the bomb the town was well aware that something strange was going on, but nobody knew quite what. But I heard—even then—about mysterious explosions in the near-by hills, about an inner cadre of officers who were never permitted to leave their quarters even for matters of life and death, about the incessant road traffic up the mountains under cover of night, about workers who went into those desolate hills by the thousand, and for months were not seen again.
New Mexico, like Texas, has its boosters. The following ardent paean was written by S. Omar (The Tentmaker) Barker of Tecolotenos, New Mexico, and was printed among other places in the El Paso Herald-Post:
Actually, of course, Texas is no bigger than New Mexico. It only appears bigger because it is spread out so much thinner. The mean average thickness of New Mexico from sunshine to sea level is 5600 feet. The higher you go into the mountains the meaner it gets. … Mashed down and rolled out to the same thinness as Texas, New Mexico would reach all the way from Yalta to the Atlantic Charter with enough lapover to flap in the Texas wind. On the other hand, at the thickest point in Texas, an average New Mexico screwbilled angleworm could bore through to the bottom in one wiggle …
Fourscore years before the first Texas cowboy scuffed a high-heeled boot on Plymouth Rock, a Mr. Coronado of Spain was eating corn off the cob in New Mexico and mailing home post-cards of five-storied Pueblo tourist courts marked “Come on over, the climb is fine.” …
New Mexico has plains so flat that the State Highway Department has to put up signs to show the water which way to run when it rains; yet the mountains are so steep that the bears which inhabit them have all developed corkscrew tails so they can sit down once in a while without sliding off into Texas….
Snow falls so deep in New Mexico’s mountains that it takes 40,000 automobile loads of Texas hot air each summer to melt it….
New Mexico is game country too. If all the deer horns in the state were clustered together into one giant hatrack, it would make a good place for Texans to hang their hats when not talking through them …
The charge that half the voters in New Mexico are sheep is erroneous. Buy and large, votes are no sheeper here than they are in Jersey City. But the sunshine is, 365 days of the year, and twice on Sundays.
Politics—it’s a shame to have to get serious again—used to be pretty much of a closed business in New Mexico, and the state was run by what was called “the Third House,” a group of lobbyists who met in the old De Vargas hotel. But the old gangs have been broken up. Politics is still so much of a business, however, that all officeholders must turn in 2 per cent of their earnings to the party headquarters.3 Till recently New Mexico was one of the three American states in which candidates were chosen by convention instead of primaries (the others are Connecticut and Rhode Island), and the primaries are still, in contrast to the habit in several western states, “closed,” that is restricted to registered members of each party. The chief pressure groups are the associations representing cattle and wool, the railways, and whatever group dominates the governor, or is dominated by him. A governor has great power in New Mexico.
The state has been Democratic since 1932, with the chief struggle a complex three-way feud within the Democratic party. The Republicans were so weak until 1946 that they didn’t even maintain organizations in more than half the counties; eastern New Mexico, which has been heavily settled by Texans and Oklahomans—one must never forget the expanding power of Texas—is an important Democratic stronghold, and so is the cotton-growing south. The principal issue, as the liberal Democrats see it, is to preserve and maintain the social gains of the New Deal.
One detail which will puzzle those who cut their politics into neatly preconceived categories is that the Republicans did carry the state—in 1928. This was when Al Smith ran. Yet New Mexico, with its great “native” vote, is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. The eleven “native” counties are Catholic almost to a man, but Smith did not carry one of them. In fact the only county he did carry was a non-Catholic county—a nice example of the unpredictableness of American political behavior.
Governor of the state from 1943 to 1947 was John J. Dempsey, a bluff, amiable, and able man. He was once a subway brakeman in New York, and rose to be vice president of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. He moved west to go into the oil business in Oklahoma, and in 1928 progressed to New Mexico; he was a congressman for a time, and under secretary of the interior under Ickes. Dempsey ran for the Senate against Dennis Chavez, also an able man, in the 1946 primary, and was beaten. This was the culmination of a long intraparty quarrel. Dempsey was called a carpetbagger by the old-line Democrats, and was accused of rule by patronage; he played a lone hand, refused to kowtow, and gave the state an excellent administration. Chavez is a “native,” and got the solid native vote. Both Chavez and Dempsey are Catholics, incidentally. Chavez led the Senate fight for the FEPC in the spring of 1946, which naturally helped his campaign. He comes of a Spanish family that has lived in New Mexico for three hundred years; he learned Spanish before English, and for a time worked as an interpreter.
Opposing Chavez for senator in the November runoff was no less a personage than the highly extroverted and inflammable Major General Patrick J. (“Pat”) Hurley, who was Oklahoma born as everybody knows, but who lately became a New Mexican. Chavez beat him in a tight dramatic race. Hurley was the American ambassador to China who, early in 1946, blew off his top about so-called Communists in the State Department and their influence on Chinese policy. Hurley is of course a legendary character. He was a Tulsa lawyer; national attorney for the Choctaw nation; a private who rose to captain of cavalry in the Indian Territory Volunteer Militia; secretary of war (under Hoover) from 1929 to 1933; personal representative of Roosevelt in the Soviet Union and Near East in 1942-43; negotiator with countries as various as Mexico and Luxembourg; long-time boss of the Republican party in Oklahoma; soldier in the Far East after Pearl Harbor; and bristly Russia hater.
The other New Mexico senator is one of the best men in Washington, Carl A. Hatch; it was he who was largely responsible for Truman’s appointment of Clinton P. Anderson, another New Mexican, as secretary of agriculture. A bluntly picturesque old wheel horse is Clyde Tingley, a former governor and the mayor of Albuquerque, a strong Chavez man. Tingley was born in Ohio, and has been Albuquerque’s mayor and boss for year after year. This is a politician’s politician. Once a friend advised him to stop murdering the King’s English. Tingley replied, “I ain’t goin’ to stop saying ain’t in any public speech, I ain’t !”
More About Indians
Governor Dempsey took me first to Tesuque, not far from Santa Fe. The Pueblo Indians who live here are as different from the Indians I met in Oklahoma as—in another India—are the peasants in Mr. Gandhi’s native village from the sophisticates of New Delhi and Allahabad. The compound is a big dirt yard, surrounded by one-story adobe huts which run into one another. The old squaws sit rocking in shady corners; children play with chili beans. These Indians are full-bloods; they are wards of the federal government; the braves wear long hair and blue marks on their foreheads; they grow corn, wheat, and alfalfa; they go to the movies in town once a week. The Pueblo is community property and its members are very poor, yes; but they have great stolidity and self-respect. Times have changed. The Indians were exempt from the draft in World War I, but not in World War II; and this tiny community contributed 10 per cent of its population to the service. Will the young men, having seen whatever was attractive or unattractive in the world outside, return to Tesuque, toss off their uniforms, go back to blankets? Or will they stay in the towns seeking jobs like whites? While I was in New Mexico, the answer to this question was not yet known; that it should have been asked with such curiosity is tribute enough to the hold the Indian way of life has on most Indians. It is a vegetarian kind of life, perhaps, but it gives a tribesman two things that are not often found together—as we well know—freedom and security. Any Tesuquan can leave this Pueblo, for a day or forever, if the governor, a member of the tribe named Martin Vigil, consents. But few ever do, Mr. Vigil told us. Incidentally the New Mexico police have no authority or jurisdiction within a reservation like this. A man may commit murder; no state official can touch him unless Mr. Vigil gives permission.
Next I went to a much larger and more celebrated Pueblo, that at Taos, two miles outside the town of Don Fernando de Taos, with its valley view which D. H. Lawrence called the most beautiful in the world, and where his ghost still hangs close. This Pueblo is of course one of the most famous “sights” in the United States. The five-story adobe dwellings, rising windowless mound on mound, date from the golden age of Pueblo culture (A.D. 900-1150); the soft-cornered church is gravely placid with its ocher roof cut in steps; old men doze in pink blankets; lizards crawl. Near by is the cemetery. This, actually, is Spanish rather than Indian, because the Indians bury their dead any which way; being Spanish it is gay with ribbons and artificial flowers and lines of bunting, with red-purple-green-orange streamers and pennants on stockades surrounding each wooden cross.
The Indians of Taos are very wise and superior, and their culture is more intact and survives more purely than any other Indian culture in the United States. They are what might be called anti-assimilationists; their idea is to avoid, rather than seek, the “fate” of Indians in Oklahoma. They hold their land not merely as government “wards,” but by virtue of actual titles granted them by Spain, which precede by a century any North American penetration. These Indians want vigorously to stay unchanged, and they are extremely secretive and tenacious about their tribal ways. Intermarriage is very rare, and most tribesmen—except for children in the federally run schools—never speak a word of English if they can help it. Many as a matter of fact try to forget what English they do learn. They do, however, speak Spanish as a rule, so as to be able to communicate with the other Pueblos; because among Pueblos alone there are twenty-two different tongues. The Taos language is impossibly difficult, and has never been written down; the Indians do their best not to give it away, and even try to conceal their own names. One visiting scholar gave up after three months’ work when he found that there are fifty-eight different ways of saying “I.”
Of course, little by little, the purity of Indian exclusiveness has become dimmed. For instance Mrs. Luhan told me that the Pueblos not so long ago ground their own flour, and their bread was something to marvel at. But now they slip into town and shop at the A&P. The government does its best to help the Indians retain their seclusion. For instance nobody may take photographs in the Pueblo without authorization from the tribe.
There is no water or light inside the Taos dwellings, and very little money; not much is needed. The residents live on wild plums, rice, mutton, chili. The Pueblos have always been farmers, never nomads; their life is mostly pastoral, and their government a kind of communalism. A governor is elected every year, alternating between groups known as the Winter and Summer People, or the Squash and Turquoise People. Over this governor, however, is the cacique or high priest whose position is hereditary. Almost all the Indians are Roman Catholic; they cling at the same time to esoteric tribal ceremonies. Marriages take place by rotation, among seven clans, in order to avoid inbreeding; the generations are rotated like the crops. When a boy reaches puberty he leaves his mother, and goes out into the hills with the old men of the tribe for as long as a year and a half, living on corn meal and wild game, learning woodcraft, and undergoing tests for endurance. When a boy is returned to his family, he is considered to be a man. This kind of discipline is necessary if the tribe is to survive, and is of course encouraged by the old men who want above everything to keep the Pueblo continuous and viable. The adult Indian, on account of the elaborate nature of his ceremonial life, cannot in theory remain outside the Pueblo long, for fear of missing rituals at stated intervals; if he does miss these, he loses rank and advantage, and must atone. Hence, the inclusion of Indians in Selective Service was a severe blow to the Pueblo system. Those who fought made splendid soldiers, excellent at out-of-door life, good at machinery because of their delicate hands, and able to go without food or sleep for long periods. They were popular in the Army too. Almost every American child has been to the circus once or twice, and the idea of having a genuine Red Indian fighting next to him was a treat.
One of the six heroic marines who, by raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima, became immortalized, was a full-blooded Pima Indian, Pfc. Ira H. Hayes, of Bapchule, Arizona. It is a striking irony that though Private Hayes was capable of partaking in this feat, about which the entire country throbbed with pride, he is not allowed to vote.
The question of the vote for reservation Indians in New Mexico and Arizona is embarrassing. The Indians, if they got the franchise, would make the balance of power in New Mexico as of today, and in Arizona soon. They might be able to swing both states in the near future. This possibility keeps politicians of all camps awake. That the Indians, who as we know are in theory American citizens with full and equal rights, are so far deprived of the vote in New Mexico and Arizona is a glaring outrage in the eyes of most believers in democracy. New Mexico operates the technique of disfranchisement by denying the vote to “Indians not taxed,” Arizona by a clause in the constitution meant originally for the feeble-minded to the effect that “people under guardianship” may not vote. The Indian Bureau has not, however, pressed a judicial decision on the constitutionality of these strictures out of fear that the Indians might be corrupted wholesale by white politicians, if they were allowed to vote while their standard of education and judgment remain inferior. But this is not the view of most officials on the spot, like John G. Evans, the general superintendent of the United Pueblos Agency, who thinks that the Indians will be quite competent politically.
As to the Indians themselves a good many—especially the oldsters—don’t want the vote. The old men of the tribe fear that they might lose their influence and grip on the younger. Another reason is the apprehension that, if enfranchised, the Pueblos will be subject to property taxes but this would not necessarily turn out to be the case. The Indians, who have been misled a good deal, confuse the franchise and taxation issues; they do not understand that they might well be permitted to vote and still remain tax free. Also of course most Indians are so poor that their taxes would be negligible, and in any case would be offset by the benefits they would gain from social security, old age pensions, and the like, from which they are at present excluded.4 Another fear is that, if enfranchised, the state governments would interfere with their way of life. But this trepidation is also said to be groundless, since Indian matters are exclusively a matter for federal authority. Finally, some Indians agree with those whites who assume that they could not stand up against political pressure; they say in all modesty, “Do we know enough to vote?” To which the answer is that, after all, they know who their own friends are, and could greatly improve their own condition by voting for candidates pledged to a reformist program in Indian affairs. All these phobias are, in a sense, theoretical. One much more concrete and drastic hits closer home. It is that the whites, somehow, sooner or later, will contrive to take their land away.
A point in this connection has to do with the watershed of that noble but muddy river, the Rio Grande. Like most American rivers, it has been allowed to run wild so that whereas the valley between Santa Fe and Albuquerque once contained 125,000 acres of good agricultural land, it now has less than half this amount. Various programs for the damming and control of the Rio Grande, to prevent silting and erosion, have been planned, but Congress has held up the appropriation. One project was given up because it would have flooded and made uninhabitable Pueblo territory. Here is a case where the federal government had to balance the merits of a much-needed reclamation scheme, on the one hand, with its responsibilities to the Indians on the other. The battle was fought mostly within the Department of the Interior, and the Indians won.
Altogether different from the Pueblos, who number about sixteen thousand in New Mexico, are the Apaches and especially the Navajos, who stretch over into vast tracts of Arizona and of whom there are perhaps fifty thousand in both states. The Navajos are nomads; their lands cover sixteen million acres and they live by grazing and raising wool; they are probably the most picturesque of all the Indians in America. Their chief, a remarkable old warrior named Henry Chee Dodge, is now eighty-five and has held the post for sixty-one uninterrupted years, though he was not a Navajo by birth. His father was killed by raiders as far back as 1862, and he does not know who his mother was.5 But his own son went to Harvard, married a white girl, and is now an Indian Bureau official. I know no more stimulating example in America of the variety of experience possible to a man in a lifetime.
Politically the Indian problem is not so acute an issue in Arizona as in New Mexico; economically it is more acute. For though Mr. Dodge himself may be very rich, the Navajos and similar tribes—for instance the Papagos who have a reservation as big as Connecticut—are very poor and are progressively becoming poorer. Of the area of Arizona not less than 20 million acres, about a third of the total, is Indian land. But this has been so overgrazed that it is worn out. It will no longer support the tribes and their sheep. The Navajos are, however, increasing heavily in population. The tribes must find something else to do or some other place to go, or starve. But there isn’t any other job or place. Another acute Indian issue in Arizona is education, and here the record is appalling. The illiteracy rate of the tribe is 80 per cent. The Navajos have only fifty schools, and most of these were closed down during the war; fourteen thousand boys and girls of school age, out of twenty thousand, have no schools at all.
Finally, as to Indians, two words on the Apaches. One is that the great outlaw chief Geronimo only gave up to the U.S. Army in 1886—so recently has the American frontier been forced shut. The other is that the Apaches still maintain one of the most curious of all anthropological taboos; no married male may ever speak to or even look at his mother-in-law!
“Outside” U. S. A.
The first thing I thought was, “Can this possibly be North America? Can we really be in the United States?” Governor Dempsey had told me that there are villages in New Mexico still 98 per cent “native,” where Spanish-Mexican families have lived for generations, where no word of English might be heard from one year to the next. So, by way of finding evidence, we dropped in at the village of Chimayó, and visited its famous church. I could not believe that I was not in Ecuador, Paraguay, or some remote oasis in Castille.
Two massive cottonwood trees provide a natural gate to the santuario, and a walled garden imposes on the scene a sad tranquillity. Women kneel; children pray. The church, made of both wood and adobe and grained with age, looks like a series of soap boxes loosely piled atop one another. The floor is of clay, and in one corner stands—of all things—an oil stove. The religious ornaments are both fantastically primitive and fantastically ornate; along the walls stand the crutches of the maimed. These have been cured by Chimayó’s healing sands, which the devout dig with their hands from a hole in the ground that is supposed never to fill up. On one side is a Mexican flag, behind lace curtains; on the other, heavy pearls loop around the neck of Christ.
The Spanish community in New Mexico is, like Spanish communities almost everywhere, cohesive, proud, and wary. There is very little assimilation between Anglos and “natives” as a rule, though young “native” girls may consider an Anglo to be a handsome catch. The great majority of “natives” are citizens who vote and political discrimination cannot be said to exist; social and economic discrimination may, however, be severe. For instance if a “native” in Anglo employ loses his job, he is apt—often with good reason—to call this the result of prejudice. The war broke down barriers to some extent. New Mexico had more American soldiers who were prisoners of the Japanese than any other state, because its national guard, full of boys who spoke Spanish, had been sent to the Philippines. Use of the term “Spanish-American” instead of “Mexican” was, incidentally, first pushed by the late Senator Cutting, who—like Chavez later—kept an appreciative eye on “native” voters. Some “natives,” of authentic Spanish stock, are wealthy land-owners; they are as supercilious on their side, and maybe with better reason, than even the most snobbish Anglos. The Spaniards have, as part of an effort to protect their culture, an organization with the curious name Sociedad Folklorica. The Spanish and Indians get along very well as a rule; the Indians find them more sympathetic, all in all, than they do the Anglos.
One unique Spanish survival is the secret religious society known as the Penitentes. These are Flagellants who have been outlawed both by the Roman Catholic church and the state but who nevertheless persist. In remote snowy hills men may, I heard, be actually crucified; the authorities may never even know about such crimes. But extremes like this are rare. What happens as a rule is that a Penitente is “chosen”—shoes left on his doorstep are the sign—and on Good Friday he is driven up into the hills, scourged, and chained for an interval to a cross made of telephone poles. The “Christ” wears a black mask—to be chosen is an enormous honor—and a “death cart” follows him, as members of the sect wave their knotted whips and sound discordant music on reed pipes. The ceremony ends with fireworks. The police, if any happen to be near by, may find bloody footprints in the snow on Easter Monday, and cases have been certified of Penitentes who died, not of crucifixion, but of exposure.
The “native” problem in Arizona is not so intimate and pressing as in New Mexico. Whereas intermarriage, though uncommon, does occur in and around Sante Fe, it is considerably more rare in Phoenix. There is a sizable Mexican vote, but it isn’t closely organized. The Spanish-speaking folk in Arizona are, man for man, much like those in San Antonio or Los Angeles, and the issues they bring up are mostly local and in the realm of education and public health—issues arising out of deplorable slum conditions and no different basically from those attending the Irish in Boston, the Poles in Detroit, or the Italians in New York.
Negroes are not conspicuous in the Southwest, though the war brought a good many to Arizona. They fall between two stools—in that they are not given as much economic opportunity as the North provides, nor are they treated quite like livestock as in the South.
Osborn of Arizona
Here is one of the best of all American governors, and one of the most interesting men in the entire country. Sidney P. Osborn is an original, and only a frontier civilization could have produced him. He is an individualist almost to the point of idiosyncrasy, and some of his mannerisms reminded me of Harold Ickes. Osborn plays a lone hand. For instance he is the only American governor out of forty-eight who has never attended a governors’ conference. His excuse for this is that the people elected him to stay in Phoenix and get some work done, and he sees no reason to be gallivanting around to Mackinac Island or Hershey, Pennsylvania. He is the first man in the capitol to get to his desk every morning, and as a rule the last to leave at night. The door to his private office has never been closed since his election in 1940. He sits in full view of the anteroom and sees all comers. He answers the telephone himself, and any secretary gets fired if she asks “Who’s calling?” or inquires of a visitor what his business is.
His chief assistant for some years was William B. Chamberlain, formerly a newspaperman abroad. I asked Chamberlain how he had come to meet him. It appears that Chamberlain was visiting a rodeo at Sonoita, and saw a tall gaunt man sitting alone on the corral fence, next to the bucking chutes. “That’s Sid,” someone pointed out. It was the governor, amusing himself far from the crowd and hoping that no one would notice him or make a fuss.
This is not to say, however, that Osborn is not a good mixer politically and a stubborn and lively campaigner. During one primary he wrote a personal letter to every one of the six thousand men and women who signed his nominating petition. After election he actually made up a list of all the registered voters in the state, about 155,000, and sent a signed letter to every one; each voter in the state got a letter. They were mimeographed, but skillfully, and every salutation was carefully filled in—Osborn drew on his excellent memory for hundreds of first names and nicknames. People still come to Phoenix, bearing these letters, and asking to see him. Also Osborn checks every day every newspaper in the state. Anybody who is mentioned—even in a routine birth or marriage notice—gets a personal letter, signed. This was particularly appreciated during the war, when the governor wrote a note of condolence to the nearest of kin of every Arizona casualty.
Osborn was born in 1884 in Phoenix within walking distance of the capitol where he now works, and he is the state’s second native-son governor. He comes of a remarkable family; all over Arizona the name “Osborn” is one to be reckoned with. His grandfather, John P. Osborn, a Scots-Irishman from Iowa and Kentucky, arrived in Arizona in 1864, long before the railways, and helped found Phoenix. This Osborn died in 1900, aged eighty-seven. The governor’s father, Neri F. Osborn, was a ranchman who lived to be eighty-eight. He died in 1943, and thus the family spans the whole history of the state.
Young Osborn went to the public schools, and got interested in travel, journalism, and politics. Though an Arizonan of Arizonans, he saw Niagara Falls—a typical enough American happenstance—before he saw the Grand Canyon. At twenty-four he became a member of the constitutional convention that preceded statehood, and in 1912, while still in his early twenties, he was elected the new commonwealth’s first secretary of state. He held this office for three terms, and was the youngest secretary of state in the country. He ran for governor in 1918 and again in 1924, but each time was beaten. What prompted him to run was mostly the Ku-Klux Klan. “It’s never appealed to me to find fault with a man on account of his religion,” he told me, and he campaigned right under the smoke of fiery crosses to force into the open what he thought, and still thinks, is an issue above all other issues, the right of people to think and worship as they please. Then he retired from active politics for fourteen years, until 1938. During this time he published and edited a journal of opinion called Dunbar’s Weekly. Years before he had been a newsboy when Dunbar, an old-school personal journalist with a pungent wit, was on the staff of that newspaper which has as remarkable a name as any in the country, the Tombstone Epitaph. Osborn maintained Dunbar’s caustic tradition, and had a lot of fun. Meantime he became an ardent FDR supporter. He ran for governor in 1938 and was beaten once more; this was his third defeat. Finally he won in 1940, and has been governor ever since. In the 1942 campaign he carried every county in the state, which had never been done before, and in 1944 he carried every precinct but twelve out of 432, something equally unprecedented. In this campaign he made only one speech. He led the ticket over Roosevelt by three to one, the first time a governor had ever run ahead of a presidential candidate, and he was the first man in Arizona ever to get more than one hundred thousand votes. Yet, when he was first sworn in, the policeman at the state house wouldn’t let him enter, because he didn’t recognize him and refused to believe that the new governor could be sauntering in alone.
Osborn has steel-colored hair, parted severely in the middle, and wears steel-rimmed glasses; his face shows self-effacement, homeliness, and a crotchety stubborn streak. It is a Grant Wood kind of face; the old Iowa strain shows through. His sense of humor is hardly acute and, when he gets angry, which is not too often, his thin lips pucker and quiver like those of a child who wants to cry.
The governor, when riding with the state highway patrol, never under any circumstances permits the siren to be sounded. “Folks don’t like it,” he explains. He has no hobbies, except reading history—when I saw him he was attacking a new biography of Martin Van Buren—and watching football. He has missed only four Rose Bowl games in twenty-three years; he thinks the greatest game he ever saw was Stanford vs. Nebraska in 1941. He hasn’t seen a movie since 1940, except “This Is the Army.” He never pushes out cigarette butts. He tosses the stub at an 18-inch ash tray about six feet away from his desk, and never misses; this procedure is fascinating to observe.
One small item is the matter of “Osborn time.” This man is, as I say, an individualist. He had a fanatic admiration for Roosevelt, but he fanatically hates daylight-saving time. When, early in the war, FDR put the whole country on daylight time, Osborn didn’t like the idea. The war plants in Arizona were working twenty-four hours a day anyway, and there was no question of electricity being saved. So he reversed the federal edict on his own authority and turned back to solar time. Air lines and railways passing through the state had to make note in their schedules that Arizona, on “Osborn time,” was an hour behind. All this was of dubious legality, but the legislature made a compromise and let it stand.
The Osborn philosophy is pithy and of-the-earth. Like so many characters we have met in this book, he stands for the small man, the underdog. I asked him what he wanted most out of life and he replied “To do something for the every-day fella, the little guy who runs a little ranch, or has a small store somewheres.” He added, “Give the everyday fella a chance, and the country will be safe. If they get along all right, other folks don’t need to worry.” He mentioned the terror so many people have of growing old. “Gol darn it, we must look after ’em decently. I want to help look after ’em.” I asked him what his ambition was and he replied, “None. All I ever wanted to be was governor.” He went on meditatively, “There’s nothing anybody can do to me. What more can I ask for, except that sometime I should return something for all the good things done for me.” Then: “I don’t find fault so much with folks who try to rob the people, but with the people who stand for it and are helpless or dumb enough to get robbed.” Finally: “Give me the vote of the man in the flivver, and you can have all the limousine vote there is.”
Osborn’s sources of power and the basis of his support are thus obvious. First, he has matched the modern mood and given effective leadership to a great mass of people who had none until he came along. Second, his intimate knowledge of the state and deep love for it command admiration. Once he lived in Washington for two years, as secretary to the Arizona delegation; he ticked off each day on a calendar, waiting for the time when he could get back. Another point is that everyone knows that he is absolutely honest. Never having had any money, so he told me, he has no interest in it. Finally, Osborn is an extremely determined and decisive personality. His mind is fixed.
One other unusual trait distinguishes the governor. All his official speeches, even those highly detailed and technical, are extemporaneous. They are taken down by a stenographer as he talks, and then printed without change under such a title as “The Governor’s Extemporaneous Message to the Legislature.
Problems and Issues in the Valentine State
The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.
—Isaiah, xxxv, I
Arizona, the fifth biggest state and the youngest, has a splendid, healthy, upswinging spirit; this is above all youthful country. For instance the first white child born in Tucson still lives there, aged seventy-seven.6 Frontier days are still a living memory; people can recall fights with Apaches right around the corner. This is one reason why the U.S. Army is, incidentally, so popular in Arizona and indeed everywhere in the Southwest. To people in Ohio, say, the Army is pretty much of a myth except in wartime; to Arizona the “feds” were liberators and are still a very definite reality. The youthfulness of the state is also reflected by its social stratifications. In the center and north—for instance in towns like Prescott which was partly settled from New England—ranches have been in a single family ever since their foundation. In Tucson and Phoenix with their wonderful resort hotels, people claim seniority over others if they arrived at the railway station twenty minutes earlier. If you’ve been in Phoenix for a year, you’re an old-timer. Then consider transportation. The railways came in in 1888, but they only tapped a small portion of the state. Arizona really began to grow and flourish when highway building began. The highways were ferociously opposed at first by the upper citizenry, because they meant more taxes. For instance James S. Douglas, a copper magnate and the father of Lewis W. Douglas, shouted out when the legislature passed a new road-building law in 1921, “If I had my way, I’d take a scarifier, and rip up every foot of paved road in Arizona!7 Now of course airplanes as well as automobiles ceaselessly span the state. I met one newspaperman who, as a growing boy, saw his first airplane—at a town called Willcox—before he had ever seen an automobile. An old Mexican looked at it too and thought it was an angel.
About 80 per cent of Arizona is still public land, and the federal government owns a greater proportion of it, some 69 per cent, than of any other state. It meets three other states at its northeast corner, incidentally the only point in the union where this phenomenon takes place. The population is still scanty, only 499,261 in 1940, but this is believed to have increased by 40 per cent in the past five years, because of war industry. Arizona is the biggest copper-producing state by far, and has been since 1907; it mines about one-third of all the copper in the country, as well as quantities great or small of every mineral known to the United States except tin. It has the largest stand of yellow-leaf pine in America, and it is the first state in long-staple cotton, the third in citrus fruit.
The two great forces pulling on Arizona are California and Texas; California still regards Arizona, like Nevada, as its own private hinterland, which the state acrimoniously resents. Texas, however, it considers to be a friend; Arizona was settled, except in the north, mostly by Texans, and Texas influence shows itself in the trends toward industrial farming and cattle as a big industry. California has a higher wage scale, and hence labor in Arizona welcomes what influence California has in this direction, while the employing class opposes it; the big citrus growers have mimicked California in forming semipolitcal pressure groups like Associated Farmers, which we dealt with at the very beginning of this book so many pages ago. For instance the Salt River Valley Growers-Shippers Organization in the Phoenix area, is supposed to be a “front” for California and reactionary interests generally. This has tied in with groups like the Democrats for Dewey organization and also Arizonans United which was formed to oppose relocation in Arizona of Japanese driven out of California.
Arizona has some odd distinctions. Only 329 square miles out of its 113,909 are water, which means that water is by far its greatest problem. It has scenic wonders unrivaled, like the Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon, and its history, though not so rowdy as that of Oklahoma, is nuggety and full of bounce. For instance Congress (or rather President Taft) refused its first plea for admission to the union, because the projected constitution was too radical—among other provisions it provided for the recall of judges; so the Arizonans simply rewrote the document as ordered, and then, when safely in, proceeded to pass exactly the same legislation that Washington had objected to. “Radical?” In the mid-twenties an Arizonan was sentenced to two hundred days in jail for saying “to hell with Coolidge.”
Arizona differs from New Mexico in that Spanish and Indian culture never bit so deep; it has more diversification, much more industry. Above all, it has water, which New Mexico has not; that is to say it has irrigation. The country around Santa Fe is high ranch country; around Phoenix it is a blooming orange grove. The Salt River Irrigation project, on which Phoenix rises from the desert that would otherwise be its ashes, is the most spectacular thing of its kind I have ever seen. Pass over in an airplane; the burgeoning green of the irrigated valley overlays the desert as if painted there with shiny lacquer. This development derives from Roosevelt Dam,8 which was one of the earliest federal reclamation projects. The total irrigated area is 750,000 acres, and Maricopa County, which was once as arid as flint, is now actually the seventh county in the country in value of agriculture produced.
Now for the last time we mention a great river, and practically all the recent history and politics of Arizona depend 6n it. The Colorado, as we. know, rises near Wyoming, then flows crosswise through Colorado and Utah, and is successively the border between Arizona and Nevada, Arizona and California, and Arizona and Mexico itself. For more than twenty years an abstruse struggle over allocation of Colorado water has been going on. A doctrine known as “prior appropriation,” well established in river law, provides that water belongs to whoever first uses it; California, at the bottom, was using most and grabbing all it could. “They are an ingenious lot in California,” said Governor Osborn in a recent speech. “They have built a great state by their avariciousness.” In 1922 the Upper Basin states—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico—got permission from Congress to form a “compact” to divide the Colorado’s flow; they wanted to tap it, by canals and so on, as it shot downstream. Roughly half of this flow, some 7½ million acre-feet per year, was assigned to the Upper Basin, the other half to the three Lower Basin states, California, Nevada, and Arizona. But for 22 years Arizona refused to join or accept this compact. The Arizonans thought that by the law of prior appropriation they should have full use of all Colorado water that flowed through their state. Came the 1930’s, and the building of one of the supreme works of modern man in America, Boulder Dam. Arizona sent out the state guard, and by force of arms attempted to halt erection of this dam, out of fear that it would deflect its precious water to California and elsewhere; interminable legal quarrels and appeals to the Supreme Court took place. But Boulder Dam was built, Arizona or no Arizona. Not till 1944 did the state finally enter the compact; the situation today is that California gets 4,400,000 acre-feet of water, Nevada 300,000, and Arizona 2,800,000 acre-feet plus part of a surplus. Arizona was pulled into the compact mostly by Osborn. His line was that during wartime, co-operation between all states was essential, and that anyway Arizona could not afford to stay out longer. For an Arizona governor to approve the compact was as sensational, from a local point of view, as if Franklin D. Roosevelt had endorsed the Nazi party and German war aims during the war. Water is a fighting word in Arizona.
The Colorado’s water became, in 1945, an international as well as a national issue during negotiations for the Mexican Water Treaty. For its last seventy miles the Colorado flows through Mexico, which also wanted a fair share of the water that makes the desert flower. California fought the treaty to the last inch, but lost. Some recondite and ugly intrigues attend this story. A good deal of the Mexican land which may become open to irrigation is owned, not by Mexican citizens, but by Californians. This land, dry, is worth twenty-five cents an acre; irrigated, it may be worth a hundred dollars. So absentee California land-lords struggled against any treaty that would limit the flow until it suited their convenience. Now Mexico has agreed to use no more than 1,500,000 acre-feet per year.
With the harnessing of water comes, as we know, power. Boulder Dam has a potential capacity of ten billion kilowatt hours, which should make cheap power available to Arizona in unprecedented quantities; heretofore power has been scarce and dear. Arizona, by terms of the Boulder Canyon Project Act, is now entitled to 18 per cent of what the dam generates, and a State Power Authority has begun to function. Power in Arizona can air-condition houses, irrigate land, mechanize farming, attract new industry, terminate the present “stoop and bend” economy. But—it’s an old, old story—the private power interests have fought public power development with acrid tenacity. Nevertheless a basic fact remains: give Arizona another million acres of irrigated land plus cheap power, and the state can go anywhere.
Politics and Such in Arizona
Arizona is overwhelmingly Democratic from a local point of view, though it sometimes votes Republican for president; fifty-seven out of the fifty-eight members of the legislature are Democrats,9 and the senate, numbering nineteen, is solidly Democratic. The governor, both senators, and both representatives are Democratic, and so are all state office-holders at the moment of writing without exception. Politics goes by patronage. When a new governor comes in, everybody loses his job, even members of the state highway patrol. That this is an unhealthiness goes without saying—unfortunately one only too common in the United States.
Since ten men make a majority in the senate, efforts to control Arizona center on this small group. It is easily influenced, and the legislators are, as in so many American states, of indifferent quality. They get eight dollars per day for a sixty-day session every two years; hence only men who can afford it—or who have a special economic interest in being a legislator—ever run. The legislature spends most of its time squabbling with the governor. This is a familiar American paradox, that the same people elect at the same time an executive and a legislature standing for different things. The chief reason for this, it would seem, is that the voters, desiring leadership, can see it personified in one man but cannot so easily choose among a group.
“The winter people,” those who come down from the East and the Great Lakes states and elsewhere to partake of Arizona’s mellifluous sunshine, are another conservative force. If they become permanent residents many turn Democratic (as with the similar community in Florida), since most elections are decided in the primaries and there is no political future to remaining a Republican. Then, within the Democratic party, they operate exactly like Republicans.
Arizona has a strong Catholic vote, particularly in the south, but it is not so predominantly Catholic as New Mexico. Nor, even though the state derives mostly from Texas, are Baptists the dominant sect; the Methodists outnumber them, with Presbyterians following close. One Catholic priest, Father Emmett McLaughlin, a Franciscan, has a considerable local reputation for his work “south of the tracks” in Phoenix among the Negroes, encouraging Negro education and welfare and proselyting them. Once a year he superintends a mixed black-white barbecue, and if it’s near election time even the politicians come. A powerful and cohesive community is that of the Mormons; the Latter Day Saints are more conspicuous in Arizona than in any other state except Utah and possibly Idaho. As far back as 1885 a law forbidding polygamy had to be passed. The present-day junior congressman, Richard F. Harless, is a Mormon, and the community is, as always, a solid entity strongly conservative in politics, very well off—nobody ever meets a poor Mormon—and deeply social minded. The Mormons are the fathers of irrigation in Arizona as they were in Utah.
Among political forces are the utility companies, like Central Arizona Light and Power, the cattle and sheep growers and feeders’ associations, the big-business citrus farmers, the insurance companies which like the utilities are mostly absentee owned, and, above all, copper. The big copper companies are Nevada Consolidated (subsidiary of Kennecott and the Guggenheim interests), with its great mines at Ray; Inspiration (subsidiary of Anaconda; mines at Miami); Miami (Lewisohn interests); Magma at Superior; American Smelting & Refining; and in particular the Phelps Dodge Corporation, which operates massive mines at Morenci, Bisbee, Ajo, and Jerome. It has reserves of 300 million tons of ore, and is far and away the biggest enterprise in the state.
Phelps Dodge has a long quasi-political history, and its influence in Arizona was once as pervasive as that of Anaconda in Montana. For at least thirty years—in fifteen consecutive legislatures—copper was the absolute boss, and I heard Arizona called “the most corporation-ruled state in the union.” The companies, chiefly Phelps Dodge, not only maintained a lobby (they still do but not so conspicuously as before); they “did favors” in the pattern adumbrated in this book so often, by giving insurance contracts to “friends,” promoting entrance into exclusive clubs, keeping their eye on judges. There were towns in Arizona—Clarkdale, Bisbee, Hayden—as completely “company towns” as any in the United States, where not so much as a loaf of bread could be baked without company permission, where the company appointed its own sheriffs, where an outsider might not even enter without consent. The companies used cheap Mexican labor in the old days, and belabored it unmercifully. They bribed anybody who got in their way, even governors, and the Corporation Commission of the state, designed to control such enterprises, became a commission actually of corporations; copper had such a grip on the whole community, in fact, that the Arizona term for conservative is still “copper collar.”
But things aren’t quite that way now. The same kind of change that is taking place in Montana came to Arizona. Democracy is expanding. Economic power gets spread out. Phelps Dodge is still a force certainly, but nothing like the force it was. Arizona is still partly in fief to absentee capital, but towns like Clarkdale are no longer hermetically sealed pools of private interest; they have become part of the United States.
Finally, consider the virile rise of agriculture. Mining, at best a wasting industry, is going down; agriculture is going up. For instance in 1944, Arizona mineral production had a value of 112 million dollars; agriculture passed it for the first time with 124 million dollars. Irrigation has made possible a lively and energetic variety of crops: lettuce, cantaloupe, pecans, carrots, above all citrus. The orange groves near Phoenix are a revelation of what science, man, and nature can produce working together. Incidentally the leaping growth of citrus still shocks and disconcerts some old Arizona hands. The cattlemen like to say, “That citrus stuff—almost as bad as a sheep herder!”
A last item worth mention is federal credit. So again we come full circle; this book first mentioned federal credit in California. A tremendous war industry, mostly in airplanes, sprang up in Arizona overnight; Alcoa built near Phoenix the largest aluminum extrusion plant in the world; of Arizona’s total income of 565 million dollars, federal credit provided 165 million dollars in 1944. Among other things this brought skilled labor into the state in great numbers, something almost unknown before, and this in turn may bring new trends in politics. Once again we are confronted with the fermentations that the enormous fluidity of America makes possible, that continually give new yeast and flavor to social-minded democracy and its procedures.
1 From New Mexico in the American Guide Series. Incidentally Santa Fe, one of the smallest American capitals (population 20,325), is the only one not on the main line of a railroad.
2 This trail ended at La Fonda, one of the pleasantest hotels in the United States, and still the nerve center of the town. An odd point is that the chef of this admirable establishment should, of all things, have once been chef to Kaiser Wilhelm.
3 Cf. Rocky Mountain Politics, op. cit., p. 240.
4 Of course one reason why whites, on their side, oppose enfranchisement is that this would make state and local contributions to social security and the like cost more.
5 Except that she was a member of what is called the Ma’iidesgizhni of Coyote Pass Clan. See New Mexico Magazine, June, 1945, article by J. Wesley Huff.
6 His name is Harry Arizona Drachman and he is custodian of the local Masonic lodge.
7 This was a somewhat violent old man. Later he was so outraged by the New Deal that he renounced American citizenship and became a Canadian.
8 Named for Theodore, not FDR.
9 The lone Republican, named Jim Ewing, runs the Tucson “Town Cats” and is a great football booster.