The Arizona Project: Phoenix, Unseemly Real Estate Speculation, and the Conservative Twentieth-Century West

Abstract This grasstops history of post–World War II Phoenix uses the archive of the Arizona Project, a collaborative journalism project, to demonstrate how unseemly (corrupt or legally dubious) transactions in land speculation and redevelopment shaped Phoenix’s conservative movement in the 1950s through 1970s. This article documents how the desire to develop Phoenix’s post-industrial finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) economy during the city’s Charter Governance era (1949–1975) created an environment conducive to corruption. The article ultimately contends that Phoenix’s interlocking political-business elites did not electorally mobilize as part of a grassroots evangelical Christian-led movement, but instead sought to shield themselves from public scrutiny through anti-democratic measures and behaviors: mobilizing and controlling white-collar land fraud, protecting and profiting from prostitution rather than policing it, corrupting state officials to selectively enforce regulation, creating a professional party structure to sideline voluntary activists from the religious right and institutionalize their own corruption-friendly brand of conservatism, and using undocumented migrants on their agribusinesses to undermine labor unions, much to the frustration of the United Farm Workers (UFW).