Sunbelt Capitalism by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

Author:Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Recreational Climate

ASU did far more than just train the Valley’s workforce; the school also provided the sporting events, concerts, and theater productions that high-tech industrialists and boosters considered vital to the business climate. As with Phoenix’s educational initiatives, a pleasure infrastructure had been a part of the New Dealers’ prescriptions for wholesale reclamation. National Resources Planning Board officials, for example, had envisioned the Southwest industrializing under “a coordinated pattern of land use, transit and transportation, recreation development, water supplies, sanitary systems, and other essential facilities throughout the entire urban area.” “The desirable urban environment,” researchers concluded, had to have “homes, playgrounds, and schools separated from commercial and industrial districts,” with “plenty of light and air and open green spaces throughout business and residential grounds.”70

The grasstops also considered the arts and recreation vital to industrial recruitment. “Why should business support art?” a Marietta-Atlanta booster asked a Knoxville audience in 1966. “To draw and hold technicians, scientists. . . . Art makes the complete city. People want to live in complete, not incomplete cities.” Well-trained engineers, scientists, and technicians were in short supply, which gave them increased power to dictate their own career paths. Many of these newly minted scientists and engineers embraced the rapidly developing suburban culture. They were, arguably, among the earliest suburbanites because they inhabited those communities that sprang up around the often remote national defense labs and industrial R&D facilities. After the war, and until the early 1960s, most enrollees in graduate engineering and physical sciences came from the white middle class. These new professionals, often family men, had less concern for pure research and more interest in lucrative industrial opportunities. California-based Douglas Aircraft Company courted this new cohort in ads that included images of suburban houses and luxury automobiles as well as men in pursuit of a litany of upper-middle-class leisure activities, including golfing and sailing. “Will your income and location allow you to live in a home like this . . . spend your leisure time like this?” asked a Physics Today ad. “They can,” copywriters promised, “if you start your career now at Douglas!”71

The Chamber employed similar recruitment techniques to prove that Phoenix’s physical climate would fulfill suburban fantasies. Promoters offered a thoroughly modern yet romantic West. The advertising committee, one historian asserted, employed the term “outdoor living” to emphasize the opportunity for year-round alfresco recreation and an escape from the rigid, fast-paced East Coast. Advertisements included pictures of backyard pools, trumpeted air conditioning, and promised well-kept parks, golf courses, campsites, and tennis courts. Recruitment literature increasingly celebrated the city’s arts scene to complement the barrage of materials on Arizona’s physical climate. “In the past we have been dwelling on the concept of Phoenix and Arizona being a wild and wooly West,” one member of the advertising committee admitted in 1965. “Now we are trying to reach the cosmopolitan New Yorker . . . and picture to him the possibility of his coming to Phoenix and not having to leave any of the refinements.”72

Chamber men pursued these opportunities for their own pleasure as well.

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