Why they matter
For twenty-four years the Scottsdale Daily Progress was owned by a liberal couple from New York in a suburb that voted for Barry Goldwater. Jonathan and Maxine Marshall bought it in 1963, and the paper they made was a participant in city politics, not just a recorder of it. It campaigned for open government, published the 1964 column that first proposed the greenbelt, and, by Jonathan’s account, opposed the Vietnam War early. In 1974 Jonathan took the fight statewide and ran against Goldwater himself.
Where to find their work today
The Scottsdale Progress. The paper’s page tells its whole history, before and after the Marshall years.
Arizona’s open meetings law. The 1974 amendment, which defined “legal action” and set rules for notice and minutes, is still part of the law governing public meetings in the state.
The paper
Jonathan Marshall was publisher by February 1963, when a Phoenix weekly welcomed “the Jonathan Marshalls, formerly of New York.” He was publisher and editor; Maxine wrote four weekly columns and, later, edited the Saturday Magazine. A colleague at Arizona State University, where she earned a degree in 1976, wrote that she was at his side “effectively as co-publisher and co-editor.” The East Valley Tribune described their paper as “a liberal editorial viewpoint that argued for open space, open public meetings and open records.”
The record of what it did rests on two kinds of source. Some of it is solid: in 1972 Marshall was elected president of the Arizona Newspaper Association, and in 1974 the Legislature amended Arizona’s 1962 open meetings law in Senate Bill 1059, co-sponsored by Sandra Day O’Connor. Some of it is his own account. He wrote that the campaign began when the Scottsdale council awarded a garbage contract at a 1 a.m. session, that he drafted the bill and Bruce Babbitt revised it, and he told an interviewer in 1987, “I was one of the first editors in the country to oppose the Vietnam War.” His memoir also credits the paper with championing the greenbelt; the city’s own histories credit Bill Walton, the council and the citizen planners, though Walton’s column did run in the Progress. A former councilman, Jim Bruner, later summed up the tension: the publisher “wanted Scottsdale to remain small … while the council viewed development as inevitable.”
The Senate race
In 1974, with Watergate unfolding, Marshall stepped away from the paper and ran for the U.S. Senate. Compiled returns show him winning the September Democratic primary with about 54 percent against two rivals. In November he lost to Barry Goldwater, 320,396 to 229,523, about 42 percent, by the official count of the Clerk of the House. He accused Goldwater, the Tribune recalled, of failing to “change the ethical standards” of the Nixon administration. His campaign files, at Arizona State University, include position papers, press releases on impeachment and Watergate, and an address to the Navajo Tribal Council.
After the paper
The Marshalls sold the Progress to Cowles Media in 1987 and put the proceeds into the Marshall Fund of Arizona, which, by the Tribune’s count, made 183 grants worth $5.5 million over fifteen years before closing in 2002 or 2003. Maxine chaired the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest and served on the state’s Pritzlaff Commission on long-term care. Jonathan died on December 13, 2008, at 84, and Maxine on June 17, 2015, at 89.
What the record doesn’t show
- The 1 a.m. council vote: its date, the contract and the council that cast it.
- Any Progress editorial on Vietnam, billboards or the greenbelt; the paper’s 1960s and 1970s files are on microfilm in the Civic Center Library and not online.
- The official canvass of the 1974 primary; the figures here are from compiled returns.
- The names and dates of Maxine Marshall’s columns.