Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

PhD Completed
Shermer defended her dissertation on May 22nd, 2009. She will file it shortly.

2009 Graduate Student Commencement Speaker
Shermer will be this year's commencement speaker at the June 14 ceremonies for those receiving graduate degrees. Her talk will consider the legacy of Clark Kerr, the UC President who refounded the University in the 1950s and 1960s. Click on title for text

Visiting Assistant Professor Appointment, Claremont McKenna College
Shermer has accepted a visiting assistant professor appointment at Claremont McKenna College.

United States History

Ph.D. 2009
B.A., University of Virginia; M.A., University of California Santa Barbara

Of the American Sunbelt cities, none burned brighter or contributed more to the conservative revival than Phoenix, Arizona. In 1910, there were but 11,000 in this small town. Now, this metropolis is a part of a metropolitan region of over four million people. This dramatic growth tells us much about the character and history of the Sunbelt Right and the political economy that sustained it. In the 1930s government expansion, union power, and New Deal economic policy traumatized Barry Goldwater and other members of the Phoenix business elite. They rightly feared that the future of a new Phoenix might well proceed along lines New Deal planners, locally-oriented businesses, and Arizona trade unionists had etched. (more...)

Goldwater and his colleagues articulated an alternative vision for Phoenix’s future, one that entailed the development of a new kind of state. The ideas undergirding their growth philosophy can best be understood as “neoliberal.” Much scholarship asserts that this ideology had its birth in postwar think tanks and took hold in the U.S. during the New York City fiscal crisis and the early years of free-market globalization. This timeline suggests then that these principles then went to the West and South. Yet, the business and political elite of mid-20th century Phoenix assembled many elements of this doctrine in their quest for hyper-growth and political hegemony. Phoenix’s economic elite opposed the New Deal state and its local iterations but they were not hostile to state action per se, especially if it sustained their vision of a growing, entrepreneurial city that competed on a national level for the most advanced and sophisticated business enterprises. In the immediate postwar years, instead of championing the crude anti-statism, Phoenix’s business community embraced government power and planning in order to reconstruct a developmental state that would privilege business by insulating the government from the electorate, weakening organized labor’s strength, curbing regulatory restrictions, and reversing the New Deal era tax shift from homeowners to businesses. As a result, over 700 manufacturing firms began operations in or relocated key facilities to the Arizona metropolis. Case studies of the successful demonstrate to bring Motorola, General Electric, Sperry Rand, and Unidynamics to the Valley illustrate that this neo-liberal agenda was crucial for the city’s growth and development.

Phoenix’s metamorphosis must be put in the context of Western and Southern growth as well as Northeastern deindustrialization. Many Southern and Western boosters had hoped to industrialize their locale but few articulated a modernization schema so violently hostile to modern liberalism or so intent on attracting industries not connected to agriculture or mining, long the pillars of the Southern and Western states’ economies. Phoenix’s success, much praised by CEOs throughout the United States, created competition between cities eager to replicate the desert miracle. Mid-century industrialism in this Southwestern metropolis did end the neo-colonial status of the region, but it hardly perpetuated the liberalism, which New Dealers had expected to accompany urbanization and industrialization.