Phoenix Democrats campaigning for Goldwater in 1958 (Shermer 166).

“Lookouts perched high above the red butte looming to the side of the town spotted the caravan of government vehicles flowing out of the Kaibab Forest like a lava stream. . . As planned, they lit a stick of dynamite and sent it up and over the town, alerting those below that the raid had begun, and to be ready.” -Martha Sonntag Bradley, 2011.

“The two great forces pulling Arizona are California and Texas.” John Gunther, 1947

On July 26, 1953, the town of Short Creek, Arizona, witnessed a scene from an old west movie: The law came to clean up the town. The predominantly Fundamentalist-Latter Day Saint community may have seen it as the inverse, though, as corrupt outlaws leading a kidnapping raid on an innocent, God-fearing frontier town.

Martha Sonntag Bradley describes the Short Creek Raid as a dramatic episode, writing that when Mohave County Sheriff Fred Porter “climbed out of his police car, the first to enter town, he was greeted by the group’s religious leader, Leroy Johnson” who confronted the Sheriff by telling him “that they had run for the last time and would stand and shed their blood if need be” (12).

The raid was part of a crusade from governor John Howard Pyle and Arizona’s new GOP to make the state welcoming to post-war businesses by “cleaning up” its national image. In 1951, only a year in office, Pyle hired a private investigative firm from Los Angeles, the Burns Detective Agency, to investigate the conditions in Short Creek. By 1953, the Burns agency provided enough evidence for Pyle to order 102 officers to take all but six Short Creek residents into custody, including 263 children. On that day, he justified his actions on radio, saying the state “now has substantially concluded a momentous police action against insurrection within its own borders” and that police “arrested almost the entire population of a community dedicated to the production of white slaves” (Bradley 6).

The raid played out like a confusion of tropes, the culmination of Arizona’s changing political landscape. A few years earlier, a host of new political elites in Phoenix began a campaign to rapidly rebrand the state from a lawless frontier wilderness to a polished, suburban business-friendly sunbelt state.

Up to this point, many Arizonans had supported Pyle’s reforms, but the images that emerged from the raid of police officers separating children from their families on purely religious grounds horrified people enough to vote Pyle out of office two years later. Pyle’s reforms were seen as an overreach, but should be seen as the extension of a larger political trend based in the state’s capital.

Pyle came from a coalition of Phoenix-based business elites who had recently swept into several civic offices in 1949 (100 years after the polygamist Brigham Young claimed the Southwest as the independent Mormon state of Deseret). They all ran together on a pro-business platform, intending to run Phoenix essentially the way they ran their own enterprises.

They called themselves the Charter Government Committee, or CGC. Its fist members included local department store owner Barry Goldwater, a lawyer and college fraternity mate of Goldwater’s named Charles Walters, Phoenix mayor and disaffected Democrat Nicholas Udall (a former businessman from the Udall family), Hohen Foster (who owned a bottling company), Margaret Kober (active in local charities and married to a prominent Phoenician doctor), Frank Murphy (who worked in life insurance), and Harry Rosenzwieg, a childhood friend of Goldwater’s whose family owned a string of jewelry stores. They also had support from Eugene Pulliam, who owned the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette, and openly used his newspapers to support the CGC.

United by shared financial interests, these eight Phoenicians met a divided opposition. Arizona had long been run by Jeffersonian-style Democrats, but the state’s labor movement had gravitated to the party in support of FDR’s New Deal. At the turn of the century, the Industrial Workers of the World had been instrumental in organizing miners’ unions in Arizona’s copper towns like Jerome and Bisbee. However, Arizona’s labor movement was consistently hampered by the state’s conservative Democratic leadership who were disinterested in workers’ rights.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer notes that “Labor movements in the West flourished in the 1940s” (682), and pinpoints union-busting as the first battleground for the emerging proto-New Right in Phoenix. In 1946, the business leaders who would later form the CGC first campaigned for a statewide right-to-work initiative, which passed as a result of their aggressive, close-knit efforts. During this time, Goldwater drew on his own history of editorials railing against the New Deal throughout the 1930s, and it was his reputation as a capitalist public figure that “helped create a network of anti-regulatory, anti-labor Phoenicians” (686). Shermer notes elsewhere that many conservative Democrats began endorsing CGC candidates, seeing in Goldwater a return to Jeffersonian tendencies, leaving the party’s labor leaders even more isolated (Sunbelt Capitalism 166).

Goldwater and his compatriots were not satisfied with a right-to-work initiative alone. They wanted to sell Phoenix, and to Goldwater, “selling Phoenix also meant creating the proper community environment” (Goldberg 71). To that end, he “lobbied Arizona legislators to send the right message by cracking down on gambling” (72), as well as prostitution. The goal was to change Phoenix from a saloon into a department store.

In 1952, the CGC went on to win the governor’s office. Pyle actually hired Goldwater to run his campaign, and Goldwater literally flew the candidate across the state to meet voters in rural and Native American communities, a contrast to Goldwater’s later indifference to Native interests when he discussed selling indigenous land for uranium mining.

Pyle’s attempt to end “polygamist insurrection” was the next logical step of the CGC’s plan to sell Phoenix as a safe investment. Pyle’s mistake was to implement this plan in the loudest way possible, parading the end of the lawless frontier out to the public. His law-and-order style authority was a bad branding move: Phoenix needed to look like it had always been owned and operated by modern upper-class nuclear families, like it had never been a liability for stakeholders.

But Pyle being booted from office made no difference. The CGC managed to run Phoenix like a committee of shareholders, concentrating the state’s power to the capital and making that power as friendly to privatization as possible. What began as a city council election became the creation of an almost unstoppable political machine that ran the city for the next two and a half decades.

Bradley, Martha Sonntag. “A Repeat of History: A Comparison of the Short Creek and Eldorado Raids on the FLDS.” Modern Polygamy in the United States ed. Cardell K. Jacobson and Lara Burton, Oxford University Press, 2011.

Goldberg, Robert Alan. Barry Goldwater. Yale University Press, 1995.

Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy. “Origins of a Conservative: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimation of Organized Labor.” The Journal of American History 95.3 (2008), pp. 678-709.

Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy. Sunbelt Capitalism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.