Sunbelt Migration, Politics, and Climate Change: The Background

As mentioned in my last (introductory) post, my intent in this series is to explore the back story of how climate change and domestic migration are intersecting, at this very moment, in the three fastest-growing U.S. states (Arizona, Texas, and Florida), and in turn how these environmental changes and migrations are fueling our current political polarization. I will be looking especially at the extraordinary growth of the major cities in these states: Phoenix in Arizona; Dallas (and its close neighbor Fort Worth), Austin, San Antonio and Houston in Texas; and Tampa, Miami, and Orlando in Florida. These now number among the largest of American cities. This post will provide the background for the series as a whole- about how these varied cities have become economic, and cultural, giants in the 21st century.

Turns out that the roots of that growth go all the way back to the 1880s in each state! Of course, each of these states varies from the other two in important ways (just as each city has its own story as well).

In terms of environment, Phoenix is in the Salt River Valley at the northern edge of the Sonoran Desert (the 2nd-driest in the nation), which extends down into the Mexican province of Sonora; on average it gets about 8 inches a year. Think of tall saguaro cacti. The major cities mentioned for Texas fall into three environments: Houston is on the flat and high-rainfall (60 inches a year!) Gulf Coast. San Antonio and Austin are in the rolling Texas Hill Country, the semiarid ecological border between the Southwest and Southeast (about 33-36 inches of annual precipitation). Dallas and Fort Worth are on the southern edge of the flatter and mostly treeless Great Plains, extending all the way north into Canada. Think of (originally) wildflower-filled grassland in the Hill Country, and cypress swamps near Houston. Florida is essentially a flat and porous limestone plateau (with numerous springs), barely above sea level. The climate and wildlife of this large peninsula become more and more subtropical, more like that of the Caribbean, as one goes from north to south. Tampa, on the southwest (Gulf) coast, gets about 51 inches, while Orlando (south-central) gets 53, and Miami (on the southeast Atlantic coast) is the wettest of all (62 inches). Between Miami and Tampa there sprawls what is left of one of the world’s largest wetlands, the Everglades (a broad biodiverse “River of Grass” marsh, draining gradually from north to south). Think alligators!

In terms of geography, these 3 states don’t share any borders, but Texas and Arizona stand out in size (Texas being the largest of the Lower 48, second only to Alaska, while Arizona is #6). In international comparison, Texas is slightly larger than France, and Arizona about the size of Italy. Florida is just under half the size of Arizona (and so half the size of Italy). In current population, Texas is (not surprisingly) the leader- 2nd only to California (about 30 million, with 40 electoral votes). Florida is right behind at #3 of U.S. states (over 22 million, translating to 29 electoral). As for Arizona, while Phoenix is the fifth-largest American city, the rest of the state is much more sparsely populated; it totals roughly 7.3 million people (now 11 electoral).

In history, the one common feature of the states is that they were all colonized by Spain; Florida by far the earliest (St. Augustine being the oldest European town in the U.S., founded in 1564). Spaniards entered Texas and Arizona before then (Texas in 1528, and Arizona in 1539), but they did not establish permanent settlements until 1680 and 1752 respectively. All three back then were remote provinces on the far northern edge of the vast Spanish Empire (Arizona being part of the Province of New Mexico). As for becoming part of the United States, Florida was first, purchased from Spain in 1819. Texas and Arizona were part of the Republic of Mexico when it won independence from Spain in 1821. American settlers in Texas rebelled against Mexico and won independence, as the Republic of Texas, in 1836, and the Republic was admitted to the U.S. as a state in 1845. That admission helped trigger war with Mexico, which ended with American victory and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. That treaty added the whole land area south of Oregon and west from the Rockies to the Pacific, including most of the Southwest, to the U.S. But not quite all of present Arizona; the sliver that includes Phoenix and Tucson (as well as part of present New Mexico) was added by the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico in 1853.

So much for general background! Now on to the individual urbanization stories for each state (I will be starting with Texas, which urbanized first). All three were initially very slow to urbanize, compared to the Northeast and Midwest. Part of the reason for that was, for Florida and Texas, the impact of the Civil War (1861-65). Both states had joined the losing Confederacy. While both were distant from the major battlefields and both successfully repelled Union invasions, they, like the rest of the South, also experienced the destruction in 1865 of the region’s brutal economy: cotton agriculture based on enslaved African American labor.

In the case of Texas, the war cost it dearly in terms of the lives of its young white men (20,000, with many others severely wounded and traumatized). The new federal holiday of Juneteenth commemorates the moment when a Union general announced the emancipation of Texas’s slaves in June 1865 (though they were not formally freed until the 13th Amendment was ratified in December). I will not try to cover the violent Reconstruction period (1865-77), with its U.S. Army occupation, brief Black access to civil rights, and Republican control of the state government. By 1877, a new agricultural system based on sharecropping was becoming established in East Texas, and political power was back in the hands of the white supremacist Democratic Party (to last for almost a century). Cattle ranching dominated the economy in central and West Texas. So one should envision a very sparsely inhabited Texas by the 1880’s, with an economy essentially based on the export of three resources: cotton (through the port of Galveston), beef cattle, and longleaf pine timber. By 1877, all of what are now Texas’s major cities were incorporated, with Austin the permanent capital.

By Ikonact- from Wikipedia, "Geography of Texas"

The factor that began urbanization was a simple one: railroads. Houston would seem to be the most unlikely town to urbanize at this point, as it was built on a swamp (next to Buffalo Bayou, with an outlet to the Gulf of Mexico). In 1872-73 the first long-distance lines were built- first one from Houston west to Dallas and Austin, and then a second (connected to the national network) coming down from the north to meet the first (reaching Fort Worth in 1876). With roads almost nonexistent, and only Galveston as a deepwater port, railroads were of huge importance to the state’s growth. By the early 1880s, more railroads spread west, connecting to El Paso in the far west and ultimately all the way to California. All of the major lines came to be under the control of outside corporations and their leaders (such as the Southern Pacific and robber baron Jay Gould). By 1911, Texas had the most rail mileage of all the states.

The impact was dramatic. Dallas grew immediately from 3,000 to 10,000, with electric power and trolleys (thanks to a hydroelectric dam) by the 1890s. Austin grew from 4,400 in 1870 to more than 14,000 in 1890. Fort Worth developed as the nation’s livestock market, shipping cattle by rail to Chicago’s stockyards. San Antonio was the largest of all by 1900, with over 53,000 (though compare this to the nation’s largest, newly consolidated New York City, with over 2.5 million!).

Black Texans moved into the growing towns during this period, as the array of job openings grew. But the conservative Democratic men who had ruled the state since 1875 would make sure that economic growth would not translate into social and political change (Texas’s electoral vote shot up from 8 in 1880 to 15 by 1892, vs. New York’s 36). The Mexican-American population, largely farmworkers, stayed concentrated in the rural west and south. The state’s Black percentage of the population declined (from 31% in 1870 to 20% in 1900). No doubt a contributing factor was the unleashing of lynch mob violence against Blacks, starting about 1882, and continuing by the hundreds per decade (!- thanks to the new research by the “Lynching in Texas” website, we know that the state would wind up with the most of any, over 700 by 1968!). Schools were already segregated. A primary goal was suppression of the Black vote. In 1897, the last Black state legislator of the era left office (there were also none from Texas in Congress). In 1902, the Democrats’ long-term goal of a poll tax, a fee to vote, was achieved, combined with a whites-only primary system (disenfranchising many Mexican-Americans and poor whites as well). Much of the remaining Mexican-American vote was controlled by political bosses in south Texas. And, though there was a strong national suffrage movement and some victories already in Western states, in Texas (as in Florida too) there was as yet no meaningful support for female voting rights.

In 1901, the story of Texas as a whole changed in the most dramatic way imaginable. Drilling for oil had been going on in Pennsylvania and Ohio for decades, with its first use being refinement into kerosene for lighting. But no really large discoveries had been made. Then, on Jan. 10, a well at Spindletop in East Texas, drilled with expertise and funding from the Pennsylvania fields, started to spray mud and methane. Suddenly it gave a roar and a gusher of oil shot 150 feet into the air! Anthony Lucas and his men had hit what would prove to be part of one of the world’s largest oilfields. Soon there were 13 gushers.

The Spindletop gusher (1901), from Wikipedia

And such good timing! Primitive automobiles had already started to take to the roads in the 1890s, some of them using the new oil-based fuel known as “gasoline.” There was an immediate, and chaotic, “rush” to the Spindletop area; the nearby town of Beaumont grew to 50,000 almost overnight. Hundreds of new companies were formed. With that blast of crude, Texas had found its own way into the national, and global, economy for the first time. More than any other state, it would literally fuel the Automobile Revolution, and much else. And, because of an antitrust governor (Jim Hogg) and his laws, most of the wealth would not go to the world’s largest oil company (John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, based in New York City). Standard would have to face major Texas rivals. Texas would also gain a concentrated and job-generating petrochemical industry (based around Beaumont, Orange, and Port Arthur on the Gulf Coast). Finally, oil became the new Texas cargo, whether by rail car, pipeline, or tanker.

Photo of Jesse Jones as a young man, c. 1900 (https://digitalprojects.rice.edu/wrc/JesseHJones/exhibits/show/title/houston)

I haven’t yet mentioned Houston’s urbanization story, which was unique, as its next phase would center largely on one person, Jesse Jones. He’d do more than anyone else to translate the new oil wealth to Houston’s and Texas’s (and his own) advantage. Jones was born in 1874 in Tennessee, and his family moved to Dallas when he was a child; his uncle got rich from East Texas lumber. Jones was a natural entrepreneur (he left school after 8th grade), confident from an early age, and physically imposing (six foot three with piercing blue eyes). He was one part gregarious charmer, and another a ruthless negotiator. In 1898, as the U.S. was in its first post-Civil war (the Spanish-American), Jones moved to Houston to manage his late uncle’s estate (worth over $1 million). In 1905, just as automobiles were arriving (still limited to 15 mph so as not to scare horses!), he entered banking. The next year he bought his first hotel; in 1907, with others convinced he’d fail in a national stock panic, he announced that he would build the three tallest buildings yet in Houston (Texaco’s headquarters, an enlarged Bristol Hotel, and the headquarters of the town’s major paper, the “Chronicle,” which he now co-owned). All went smoothly, and he also became chair of the town’s largest bank. He next set his mind on an extraordinary engineering project that would catapult Houston to being the state’s largest city: the construction of a Ship Channel, dredging the 40 miles of Buffalo Bayou deep enough for oceangoing ships, like oil tankers (more on that, on Jones, and on his impact on Texas in the next installment).

Florida, hot (the first attempt at air conditioning was by a doctor in its Panhandle!), humid, and mosquito-ridden, did not, not surprisingly, see any urbanization until the 1880s as well (other than Jacksonville in its far northeast corner). As historian Revels says: “The lonesome Spanish sentry, slapping futilely at mosquitoes & sweating buckets in his iron helmet, probably never imagined that Florida would ever be considered a haven for pleasure-seekers.” Its economy did start to pick up after the Civil War (in which almost 5,000 Floridians perished). A few wealthy Northerners began to come in, as tourists or seasonal residents. Cubans settled as cigar workers in the Tampa area, and the citrus industry began to flourish by the 1870s, in the state’s center (alongside the cattle ranching there), which is where the rail lines ended at that point. Still, in 1880 it was the Southern state with the fewest people (just under 270,000!).

All of that was about to change rapidly, due to three visionaries. The most far-reaching was Henry Flagler, born in western New York in 1830, who moved to the expanding city of Cleveland in Ohio. There he met young John D. Rockefeller, and fatefully arranged a crucial large loan ($100,000) to him by Flagler’s stepbrother, just as John D. was entering the oil business in 1867. Rockefeller made him a partner, and in turn they created Standard Oil in 1870, one of the most successful corporations in history, as it would come to control practically the entire American refining industry. The second pivotal event in Flagler’s life came when he visited Florida for the first time in 1878; he liked it immediately. By 1883, he would have a vision- he would use his oil wealth to transform the state, and he would make the state’s oldest town, St. Augustine (with its romantic stone Spanish fort, the Castillo San Marcos), its first real tourist mecca. Once again the secret ingredient would be railroads. Flagler set out to buy up and extend rail lines steadily southward from Jacksonville along the Atlantic coast; he built the state’s first grand hotel in St. Augustine, halfway down that coast, by 1888. By 1892, he was laying new track south from Daytona to create the new town of Palm Beach. When a freeze hit most of Florida in winter 1894-95 (badly damaging the citrus crop), Flagler realized that he should go still further south. His railroad reached the present site of Miami in 1896, and then he got really ambitious: constructing the Overseas Railroad all the way to the southernmost point, Key West, an old fishing town and naval base at the end of the Florida Keys. It wasn’t finished until 1912 (at a cost of $50 million!), and a hurricane killed 135 of its workers in 1906, but he had created, by the time he died in 1913 at 83, the incentive for others to develop the long chain of Atlantic Florida cities we see today. He had also inspired a rival, Henry Plant, who did much the same for the Gulf Coast (linking its towns, including St. Petersburg and Tampa, by rail and building yet more upscale hotels). And there was a third large-scale developer, the most one with the most multifaceted vision: Mrs. Bertha Palmer, the glamorous widow of one of Chicago’s richest men (famous for her jewelry and Impressionist collection!), who came to visit Sarasota, then an obscure fishing village, in 1910. She bought 80,000 acres (eventually 140,000!) and set out to transform the economy, starting with getting a rail extension built to the area, and then improved the local cattle breed (plagued with ticks), and introduced a new crop (chayote). Her rich friends soon turned the town into an elegant resort.

The entrance to the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, now Flagler College (with statue of Flagler) by Upstateherd, Wikipedia

With the state’s development still in its infancy and its population size still very small for its area, Florida’s politics in the 1880’s (and later) was a backwater in national terms. It was the same kind of rigidly enforced Jim Crow Democratic one-party system as Texas’s. There was a factional division within the Democrats. There were the Antis, conservative businessmen subservient to Flagler, apparently named for their opposition to any move contrary to their interests!), versus the Straightouts (haven’t found an explanation for that name!!), mildly liberal Populists looking out for the farmer majority. The first series of postwar governors were Confederate veterans, and the state was fully involved in the brutal practice of convict leasing. That meant getting a large part of state revenue from letting private businesses rent the prisoners, mostly Black, for manual labor, including, in the thousands, building Flagler’s (and presumably Plant’s, though I haven’t found confirmation) rail systems. Black workers were also exploited in central Florida’s turpentine camps, orange groves, and phosphate mines. From 1882 to 1968, Florida mobs lynched 257 people, again mostly Black, like Texas contributing to the Black exodus of the Great Migration from 1915 on.

Florida convict laborers, taken in Volusia Co. in July 1914 (floridamemory.com)

Of the three states I’m examining in this series, Arizona was certainly the most remote in the late 1800’s (fittingly enough, it was the last state in the Lower 48 to be admitted!). After a brief Confederate invasion in the Civil War, Arizona Territory was established in 1863. The two largest indigenous tribes, the Navajo and Apaches, both resisted federal control and confinement. The Navajo were exiled from northern Arizona to New Mexico (a tragedy known as the “Long Walk”) from 1864 to 1866, but, most unusually, were returned to their homeland (they are today the largest indigenous people in the nation, with the largest reservation). The Apaches, whose homeland straddled Arizona and New Mexico Territories, resisted much longer; the last small band of Chiricahua Apaches, under the famous chief Geronimo, surrendered and were deported out of the Southwest in 1886. Phoenix’s origins (my topic here) therefore lie in the much-mythologized “Wild West” period (1860s-1880s): the period of Billy the Kid, the Shootout at the OK Corral, etc. The only non-native town of any size in the territory was Tucson in the southeast, mostly inhabited by Mexican Americans, and the area’s first industries were copper mining and cattle ranching.

In 1867, an ex-Confederate named Jack Swilling came to the Salt River Valley (lower, hotter, and drier than the Tucson Basin to its east), and discovered its network of ancient canals. These were built by the Hohokam people, starting around 650 CE, and it was the largest and most sophisticated irrigation system in the continent until the 1910s. But the Hohokam, who may have numbered as many as 80,000, experienced two very severe and long droughts in the 13th and 14th centuries, and vanished from the archaeological record by 1450. The Spanish encountered the present Tohono O’odham people in the area, incorrectly called the “Pimas.” But neither the Spanish or Tohono O’odham had permanent settlements in the valley. Swilling cleared out a canal, diverting some of the rather bitter water (hence the Spanish name, Rio Salado, “Salt River”). His irrigation of crops (to sell to the local U.S. military outpost) soon attracted others, including an Englishman who, watching the canal system being revived, named the small settlement after the mythological phoenix bird of rebirth. By 1871, the town was “platted” (streets laid out in a grid), and its county (Maricopa, which now holds half the state’s population) was created. By the time Phoenix was incorporated in 1881 it had just over 1,700 people (already a mix, including 5 Blacks and a handful of Chinese). By then it had a schoolhouse, a telegraph line, a bank, and Wild West entertainment (“16 saloons, four dance halls, two monte banks and one faro table”- most likely prostitutes too).

from Wikipedia, "Salt River Valley"

As I’ve already noted for the other states, what transformed Phoenix into the nucleus of a big city was the arrival of a railroad- in this case the Southern Pacific, the second transcontinental line (after the famous one that was finished in Utah in 1869). It was built by Chinese crews east from southern California, crossing the Colorado River into Arizona at Yuma; a branch line came to Phoenix in 1887 (the main line was continued west until it met the national network in Texas). Rail access to the outside world meant the arrival of basics such as bricks for housing (more permanent than the traditional adobe), and many more settlers, who further expanded the canal system. A former veterinarian, Alexander Chandler, laid out a new adjacent town named for himself, followed by other future suburbs (such as Scottsdale and Glendale). In 1889, there was another growth milestone, when Phoenix beat out Prescott and Tucson to become the territorial capital. Another pivotal event was a massive flood of the Salt in 1891, which washed out the town’s bridge and temporarily ruined the irrigation system. The Anglo settlers then created segregation rules: they moved north, away from the floodplain, and restricted nonwhites to the flood zone in the south. The town quickly revived (gaining streetcars, telephones, and in 1895 its first high school), just as sentiment was building across the territory for becoming a state. In Phoenix, that movement was led by the first wealthy couple: Dwight and Maie Heard, who built the town’s first mansion and collected Native American art (their collection is now in a landmark museum there). A new type of settler now began to arrive- the so-called “lungers”, sufferers from the then-incurable global plague of tuberculosis, who sought respiratory relief in the clear desert air.

The next transformative event, the last I’ll cover, had to do with the federal government. In 1902, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, the first president to show a deep interest in the Far West, pushed through the Reclamation Act, creating a new federal agency tasked with building America’s first big dams- out West, for irrigation and electricity, to speed the region’s development. By now the Salt Valley’s big farmers, with their thriving citrus orchards and produce, had organized, and of course they were very interested (especially if the federal government paid all the cost!) in a big dam upstream that could end the periodic floods and provide water during the equally common droughts. That big dam was authorized in 1905, as one of the first five Reclamation projects. A diverse labor force was brought in from outside, for what would be the world’s tallest masonry dam: Apaches from the Arizona mountains (who built the “Apache Trail” road to the remote site); African Americans; Italian stonemasons; and Mexican Americans. The $10 million project took almost 6 years. On Mar. 18, 1911, former Pres. Roosevelt arrived to speak at the dedication (the dam would be named for him after his death). It created what was then the world’s largest reservoir- enough water to irrigate 250,000 acres. On the eve of Arizona statehood in 1912, Phoenix (even before air conditioning!) was already showing every sign of becoming the largest city in the Southwest.

To sum up, by 1913 each of these states had found its individual formula for future urban growth: for Texas, its massive oil industry (soon to feed the world’s energy demands through a major port in Houston, thanks largely to Jesse Jones); in Florida, large-scale development of railroad and hotel infrastructure, which would soon build its mass tourism; and in Arizona, first rail connections and then federal funding for large-scale irrigation, while the desert climate drew first tuberculosis patients, and then tourists, to the Phoenix area. Next time I’ll explore how each of these urban seeds began to sprout!

Resources:

Steven Fenberg, “Unprecedented Power: Jesse Jones, Capitalism, and the Common Good.” (2011)

Michael Logan, “Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson.” (2006)

Martin Melosi & Joseph A. Pratt, eds., “Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast.” (2007)

Bill Minutaglio, “A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas.” (2021)

Gary Mormino, “Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern FL.” (2005)

David Owen, “Where The Water Goes: Life & Death Along the Colorado River.” (2017)

Marc Reisner, “Cadillac Desert: The American West & Its Disappearing Water.” (revised, 1993)

Tracy Revels, “Sunshine Paradise: A History of Florida Tourism.” (2011)

Andrew Ross, “Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City.” (2011- Phoenix)

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics.” (2013)

Lawrence Wright, “God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State.” (2018)