At a glance: Arizona became a state in 1912, and in its first three years its voters gave women the ballot and voted liquor out. Scottsdale still had no government of its own. The county ran its elections and roads, it shared a justice of the peace with Tempe, and its school district was the only body it elected. What politics it had happened in the schoolhouse, where Progressives argued for the dry amendment, a candidate for governor stopped to speak and the farmers organized; in a land company’s office in Phoenix, which tried to sell it as a suburb; and, after April 1917, in the war committees that set its quotas and filled them.
Statehood, and a precinct nobody printed
The decade opened with the founder gone. Winfield Scott died in October 1910, and Arizona’s voters ratified their constitution four months later. President Taft vetoed it over one clause, the recall of judges, so on December 12, 1911 the territory voted to strip that clause and, in the same election, chose its first state officers. James McClintock, the era’s historian, called it “a democratic landslide, not a single republican being elected to state office.” The Arizona Republican reported that the recall amendment carried by so large a majority that “early in the evening the figures concerning it lost interest.” Scottsdale was one of eighteen precincts whose returns were in by press time, but the paper printed only their combined totals. Taft signed the statehood proclamation on February 14, 1912, at 10 a.m. The day page tells that story.
That pattern holds all decade. Scottsdale voted in every election, and its votes were counted, but no paper read for this chapter printed them on their own. What the record does keep is who ran the polls. In November 1916 the Scottsdale column named the election officers, Charles Miller, Walter P. Smith, S. V. Embry, R. H. Woolf, Charles Coldwell and J. M. Munter, who “were kept at the voting place until the following morning.”
Who voted: women in, and the literacy line
The first great question of the new state was the vote itself. The suffragists went around the legislature with an initiative petition. They needed 3,342 names, fifteen percent of the 1911 vote for governor, and in early July 1912 the Republican reported that “the suffragists are concentrating on Maricopa county.” They filed on July 5. On November 5, 1912, Arizona’s men approved woman suffrage 13,452 to 6,202, according to the official canvass and McClintock, and every county voted yes. Maricopa’s vote was 3,016 to 1,523. The same ballot restored the recall of judges, 16,272 to 3,491.
Scottsdale’s own vote is lost. The canvass was printed by county, and the Republican’s issues from October 8 to November 27, 1912, the weeks of the campaign’s close and the count, were never digitized. No Scottsdale suffrage meeting turned up in the campaign weeks that survive.
The electorate was also narrower than it looked. Arizona required voters to pass an English literacy test, under a state law of 1912 or 1913 by different accounts; one account dates a territorial version to 1909. Ida Husted Harper’s history of the suffrage movement, written by its own leaders, noted of the 1912 election: “The vote was small, as most Mexicans were disfranchised by an educational requirement.” The City of Phoenix’s survey of its Hispanic historic places says the law was not repealed until 1972. In 1913 Phoenix replaced its ward elections with at-large seats. Scottsdale’s historic context for its 1961–1979 growth, citing the historian William Collins, says the change ended the influence of the two wards where Mexican Americans had been the majority; that consequence rests on that one account. The literacy law reached a farm town whose cotton crop would soon depend on Mexican workers.
The dry amendment
Scottsdale had meant to be dry since the 1890s, but as an unincorporated place it could pass no law. In 1914 the state did it for them. The only Scottsdale campaign meeting on the question that turned up was a party rally. On October 10, 1914, the Progressive Party’s county candidates held “a rousing meeting” before “a crowded school house,” with V. A. Vanderhoof in the chair, and the Rev. Daines of Tempe gave “a very clear discourse on the platform and principles of the progressive party, and a very clear idea of the dry amendment.”
On November 3, 1914, prohibition carried 25,887 to 22,743. It won in fewer than half the counties, and Maricopa decided it. “In only five of the counties of the state did prohibition carry,” McClintock wrote, “and the majority in Maricopa County alone was practically the same as that within the state at large.” The Republican’s headline the next morning: “COUNTY GOES DRY AND ADDS TO STATE MAJORITY.” The law took effect at midnight on January 1, 1915, the subject of its own day page. In 1916 voters kept it, and the Republican candidate for constable of the Tempe and Scottsdale precincts ran on it: “I stand absolutely for prohibition and its coming amendments.”
The townsite for sale
In the fall of 1913 a Phoenix firm tried to turn the settlement into a suburb. On October 12 the Republican reported, under the headline “MAKING TOWN OF SCOTTSDALE,” that the Arizona Investment company was opening “the townsite of Scottsdale” across the road and west of the post office. A contract had been let to grade the streets, and new signs naming them were made. The same article noted that “Scottsdale is the place where Vice-President Marshall of the United States usually spends part of his winters.”
By the end of November the Arizona Investment and Land Company had “taken over the development of the townsite,” and its advertisement sold the settlement on the Vice President’s name: “VICE PRESIDENT MARSHALL purchased three lots here for his future home. This is where the big WRITERS CLUB, men of letters and affairs have located winter CLUB HOUSES and HOMES.” Lots were “$175 and up,” with “$10 down, $10 per month.” The next May its copy described a commuter town before Scottsdale had a paved road: “Scottsdale is just far enough removed from the city of Phoenix to become a beautifully located suburban town … Here the $100,000 Writers’ Club will be built.”
All of this is the company’s own copy, printed in one paper. Who owned the firm has not been found, and no later trace of the Writers’ Club turned up in the issues read through 1919. Without a town council, the land company decided what the streets were called.
The growers had a different plan for the place. The October 1913 article reported that they hoped “to have a cotton gin installed for next year’s crop.” By June 1914 Scottsdale growers were members of the sixty-member Tempe Cotton Exchange, which was building a gin at Tempe for about 2,500 acres, an eighth of them next to Scottsdale. Cotton was a main crop before the war. The war made it the crop that ran everything.
The railroad that stopped
The settlement had wanted a railroad since Scott’s day. In August 1911 a Phoenix group, F. M. Winter, C. C. Lewis and their partners, chartered the Salt River Valley Electric Railway, $600,000 in stock, to connect Phoenix with Ingleside, Scottsdale, Tempe and Mesa. On January 31, 1912, its president and secretary met “the citizens of this vicinity” at E. O. Brown’s store. Brown and A. G. Utley agreed to deed right-of-way across their land, and the meeting put the passenger depot on Indian School Road where Utley’s land joined Mrs. Scott’s. The Republican’s correspondent wrote: “Not only that Scottsdale should grow into a large town, but that Scottsdale should have a railroad, was the dream of the chaplain’s life.”
The company won a franchise in Tempe and an extension of its Phoenix franchise in December 1912. After January 1913 the Electric Railway Journal and the Republican stop mentioning it. No line reached Scottsdale, and the record does not say why.
The Vice President’s town
The Marshall connection was real, if part-time. Lois Marshall was the daughter of W. E. Kimsey, a Scottsdale rancher who had lived in the Valley since about 1907. In November 1914 a motoring column directed drivers “along Scottsdale road a mile to where Tom Marshall is building his new house.” In October 1915 the Vice President spoke at the founding of the Farm Improvement Association, and in October 1917 the family arrived for “a short stay at their pleasant bungalow.” Where it stood is still not settled.
On October 21, 1917, six months into the war, several hundred people drove out from Phoenix for a concert in Marshall’s honor. He spoke “using the front porch of his home as a platform,” and told them “it is your duty to assist the government toward a successful promotion of the war, not alone by giving money.” The crowd’s cars made “the road on which the Marshall home faces” “well nigh impassible.”
Kimsey made his own try for office. In February 1916 he announced for president of the Water Users’ Association, the Valley’s most important farm office, advertising that he had “been a resident of the valley for more than nine years and have voted at every election during that time.” On April 4 he finished fourth of four, with 8,712 votes by the acre to John P. Orme’s 25,635.
The farmers organize
The settlement’s first standing civic body since the school board was a farm club. On October 1, 1915, after speeches by the county farm advisor and the state leader, a schoolhouse meeting voted unanimously to form a Scottsdale local of the county Farm Improvement Association, and the paper noted that “women took a prominent part.” On October 16 it organized with Walter P. Smith as president, W. E. Kimsey and Charles Miller as vice presidents and Mrs. Stout as secretary-treasurer, and the Vice President “delivered an interesting address.”
The association became the town’s meeting. It raised money for a school piano with an “Old Maids’ Convention” on Washington’s Birthday in 1916, at which Marjorie Thomas sang. In November 1916 it heard Congressman Carl Hayden on the “Final Audit bill.” Our note on the women who organized early Scottsdale follows the clubs.
The water vote and the $21 acre
The decade’s sharpest political argument in Scottsdale’s hearing was about money owed on the dam. On the eve of the November 1916 election the Kibbey Committee ran a full-page advertisement in the Republican. “In the proposal to elect Joseph H. Kibbey to the United States Senate,” it began, “every land owner in the reservoir project has at stake the sum of $21 an acre on every acre he owns.” It named Scottsdale among the towns that owed the farmers their votes, and it accused the Democratic senator, Henry Ashurst, of a law “taking the water from thousands of acres in the Salt River Valley and giving it to Indians.” Kibbey was a former territorial governor.
The week before, the Republican candidate for governor, Thomas Campbell, made “a flying trip” to Scottsdale and gave “a short talk at the school house, to a large and interested audience.” Kibbey led the first 58 Maricopa precincts counted, 5,010 to 4,476, and lost the state, 29,873 to 21,261. Campbell led the official count by 30 votes, and the state Supreme Court seated the Democrat, George W. P. Hunt, by 43 on December 22, 1917. A week after the vote Hayden was at the Scottsdale schoolhouse talking about the audit.
The Valley’s water fight had another side that the ad did not mention. From 1910 the Yavapai physician Carlos Montezuma was fighting the Indian Bureau and the Water Users’ Association over a plan to move the Fort McDowell Yavapai off the Verde and onto the Salt River reservation, so that the water could go downstream.
A school district, a road and a bridge
The school board was the one office Scottsdale filled itself. At the election of April 1, 1916, Charles Miller was elected to a vacancy; V. A. Vanderhoof, the outgoing member and former clerk, did not run. In June 1918 representatives of the Creighton, Madison and Scottsdale districts went before the supervisors on “the advisability of creating a new school district” from parts of Creighton’s and Scottsdale’s, against opponents who said it “will double the present tax rates.” No decision was reported.
Roads were the county’s business. In January 1919 the supervisors went “to Scottsdale today to consider a bridge site over the Scottsdale slough.” That June the county began an 18-foot road from Tempe that spared drivers the Hogback, a hill loaded trucks had climbed in two trips; private subscribers, “over 100 citizens of Scottsdale, Phoenix and Tempe,” added $1,000 to the county’s $1,800, and by August it was “practically completed.”
The war
War came in April 1917, and in a place without a government it was run by committees. In May a farm census meeting at the schoolhouse, with Vanderhoof as chairman, signed up twenty of the sixty people present and appointed Anna Cash, Charles Coldwell and Vanderhoof to carry on. In June the state council of defense found about 75 boys, “from eleven years old upward,” in farm camps at Tolleson and Scottsdale, picking cotton. Women sewed for the Red Cross each week in the schoolhouse.
The money drives used the school districts. In April 1918 Charles Miller chaired the Third Liberty Loan for Scottsdale, with Mrs. Walter P. Smith leading the women; the quota was $20,000, “two per cent of the tax valuation.” At a schoolhouse rally Judge Sloan spoke “to the grown folks, while the children were gathered outside around a huge bonfire,” and “the Scottsdale district went over the top with a flourish.” Mrs. Smith’s captains included Marjorie Thomas, and Miller’s included E. O. Brown and William Kimsey. That October, in the Fourth Liberty Loan, Miller and Mrs. Morton Kimsey led a house-to-house canvass, and the column reported that the town beat its $19,000 quota “by several thousand dollars,” calling it “proof of the red-blooded Americanism of our men and women.” The paper also reported that Scottsdale had doubled its quota in the Third Loan. Miller chaired the United War Work drive in November, working “from daylight until dark.”
Not every drive went that way. By October 1, 1918, the county chairman’s table showed Scottsdale had bought $890.50 in War Savings Stamps against an allotment of $6,810.03, about 13 percent. The papers read for this chapter record no draft resistance in Scottsdale. They record the cost: Ramon Estrella died of pneumonia at Camp Funston in 1918, and in May 1919 the paper reported that Vicente Ochoa, “member of one of the best known Spanish families of the Scottsdale district,” had been killed in the Argonne.
The workers the vote left out
The war made cotton king, and cotton needed pickers. On October 7, 1917, under the headline “MEXICAN LABORERS HELP SCOTTSDALE,” the column reported “an almost daily influx of Mexican laborers,” including a group of about twenty who arrived at the Security Acres ranch, “each one armed with an identification card containing his picture, name, and short description,” from “aged grandmother, down to tiny niño of about two weeks.” These families did the work the boom rested on. Newcomers from Mexico could not vote, and the literacy law kept many Mexican Americans from the ballot. The Scottsdale columns say nothing of what the pickers were paid, where they lived or what they thought. The 1910s chapter tells the boom’s economic story, and the health seekers note covers the influenza winter of 1918–19.
Into the 1920s
By 1919 Scottsdale had a farm club, a PTA, a road to Tempe, the Vice President’s bungalow and a cotton economy at its height. It still had no government. The next decade brought a bank, a high school and the cotton crash, and the town would go on being run by its school board, its clubs and the county until 1951.