We have looked into the future, and the future is ours. . . . Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.
CESAR CHAVEZ, ADDRESS TO THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF SAN FRANCISCO, NOVEMBER 9, 1984
Nathan Allen always referred to it as the “time of change.” As streaks of lightning cascaded down the Estrella Mountains to the vast western stretches of the Akimel O’odham Nation, we would stroll the dusty trails toward the seemingly lifeless banks of the Gila River. Swirls of dust devils chased each other around the brush and cactus; saguaros somehow limped in the oppressive heat. We were waiting for the rains; the claps of thunder that rolled into the late afternoon and shook the monsoon storms onto the earth. Within minutes, the akimel river would be flowing, what Allen called the “ribbon of life.” The creosote exuded a pungent aroma, a rush of invisible steam. The frogs eventually emerged on cue, as signs of life revamped a dormant desert world.
“Oigie thoth huibak,” he would say. “Come, let us rest. This is the time of change.”
As those same summer monsoons gathered for their daily barrage in the Sonoran Desert in August 2010, Democrat Randy Parraz held a press conference for his insurgent US Senate campaign. He planned to officially hand-deliver a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio at his office for his 2008 false arrest.
Not exactly a textbook event for a Senate candidate in the Democratic primary, but then again, this was Arizona in the summer of SB 1070. Parraz’s campaign cast a most unflattering light on the state Democratic Party’s head-in-the-sand approach to the most-talked-about issue in the state. This was the role he had always played as a community organizer and lightning rod. Hence the arrest by Arpaio’s deputies.
Parraz wasn’t alone. His arrest was the entry point for Chad Snow, the cofounder of Citizens for a Better Arizona, into a whirlwind campaign that would devour the next few years of his life.
In the spring of 2008, after a short period of organizing immigrant construction workers for the Laborers’ International Union, Parraz decided to launch his first battle in the Phoenix area to expose civil rights abuses, including racial profiling. Parraz was not dealing with Russell Pearce’s legislative policies but with the dragnet practices of Sheriff Arpaio, whose immigrant crime sweeps had been spiraling unchecked in targeted Latino neighborhoods. Establishing the Maricopa Citizens for Safety and Accountability, Parraz and his supporters appealed to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to address Arpaio’s twenty-year reign of fear and clampdown. Over several months, Parraz’s group filed petitions and complaints, and turned out in scores at board meetings, but never managed to nudge the equivocating board into action.
And perhaps for good reason. Arpaio had teamed up with disgraced Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas to launch a bizarre witch hunt against county employees and supervisors who had questioned his reign of terror. It took years and a few destroyed careers before Thomas was finally called before an ethics hearing, tried for fraud and dishonest conduct in filing frivolous criminal and civil cases to harass his rivals, and disbarred from the courtroom.
When Parraz and others spoke out at a Board of Supervisors meeting on September 26, 2008, knowingly without the permission of the board chairman, they understood that the rules required a warning and then ejection from the meeting. After Parraz delivered a six-second appeal for the board to place the group’s concerns on the agenda for public consideration, he left the chambers.
A moderate Republican attorney, Snow had attended the meeting out of curiosity. Arpaio’s antics had perked up his ears; he felt the sheriff had evolved over the years into an increasingly corrupt self-promoter. Snow had never met Parraz; in fact, he could not have identified him in the room without someone’s help. Once the board meeting was adjourned, Snow rose to leave, but he found himself sandwiched between two sheriff deputies.
“They grabbed me, grabbed my stuff,” Snow told me, leaning back in his chair at his Phoenix office, where he deals with workmen’s compensation suits. “They threw handcuffs on me, and I’m wondering, What the hell is going on?”
Five minutes of confusion ensued. Snow asked why he was being detained, and if the two deputies knew he was an attorney. It wasn’t until a third deputy came down the hallway, looked at him, and announced, “Oh, that’s not him,” that Snow was released.
These are the perils of being a tall, physically fit attorney in your forties, with a fashionably clipped haircut. Although Snow may have some passing resemblance in profile to Parraz, they couldn’t have been more different in background. A lifelong Republican and subscriber to the Rush Limbaugh newsletter, Snow grew up in Glendale, Arizona, in a traditional Mormon family.
“As I’m walking out the hallway,” Snow recalled, “I see Randy walking down in handcuffs.” Realizing he had been mistakenly cuffed in a ploy to silence Parraz, the outraged Snow and his partner immediately hopped in their car, went down to the police station, and offered their legal services to the community organizer.
Snow never looked back. As the conservative Republican to Parraz’s liberal Democrat, the two joined forces in a campaign that arguably owed its birth to Sheriff Joe’s excessive actions.
Even with his charges dropped, Parraz still had no plans to let Arpaio off the hook. He was not alone in this matter. From 2004 to 2007, over 2,700 lawsuits of wrongdoing were filed against Arpaio in county and federal courts—more than the combined total of several cities, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. Over the next few years, keeping tabs on the lawsuits against Arpaio and his office would be like playing the lottery; the stakes not only grew exponentially but also cost Maricopa County more than $45 million in damages. By the end of 2011, more than $176 million in damages and claims were being pursued in court.
Basing their actions in the historic El Campito barrio, Parraz and his Maricopa Citizens for Safety and Accountability launched a weeklong fast in the fall of 2008 at the Santa Rita Hall, the historic location of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers fast in 1972.
“Our top cop in Maricopa County should not be under investigation for civil rights violations,” Parraz said, chronicling Arpaio’s documented abuses. “He needs to step aside so we can have a real top law enforcement officer who really cares about people’s concerns.”
Three months later, in an extraordinary act of reproach, the Department of Homeland Security stripped Arpaio of his special powers under the 287(g) program, which had effectively granted the sheriff and his county troops unchecked authority (reserved for federal jurisdiction) to target suspected undocumented immigrants.
It didn’t bother Arpaio in the least. He immediately took the stage on the Glenn Beck show and reminded the Obama administration that even though he had signed off on canceling the agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, “nothing has changed. I’m still going to do the same thing.”
How can this happen, Beck wondered aloud, repeating his mantra that Phoenix was the city with “the highest kidnapping rate in the country.”
“It’s all politics,” Arpaio said in a huff. “They probably don’t know about it,” he said, referring to the federal government, but he still planned to enforce federal laws. “It’s gonna be great not to be under the federal umbrella,” he went on, attempting to explain to a flummoxed Beck his interpretation of his self-ordained authority. If Arpaio’s deputies came on some “people looking erratic,” he explained, “if they have their speech, what they look like, look like they came from another country, we can take care of that situation.”
Beck smirked in laughter, “that sounds like profiling.” Beck’s irony wasn’t lost on the viewers. Within a year, SB 1070 would finally give Arpaio the justification that even Beck had mocked.
There were three stories about Arizona and his life that made their way into virtually every stump speech and interview with Russell Pearce, and all of them turned the leatherneck politician’s voice into a puddle of pity, if not spurring a rare moment of humanity.
First, Pearce wanted everyone to know that he had been shot in the line of duty in 1977. On the slim chance you hadn’t read about it, the Medal of Valor from the Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Office for his “brawl with three teenagers” in the neighboring town of Guadalupe—a Yaqui and largely Mexican American area between Phoenix and Tempe—hung on his office wall. Despite being shot through the chest and hand, Pearce had managed to apprehend the suspects.
Raised by his mother in a big Mormon family in what he described as a “Hispanic neighborhood” in Mesa, his alcoholic father largely missing from the picture, Pearce always fought back tears at the memory of his second story: a neighbor delivered a bag of food during a particularly rough period, and his mother commanded the children to not touch the groceries. As he recounted this story in 2003 to college instructors in Mesa, who had objected to Pearce’s role in slashing state job-training adult education budgets, Pearce’s hardscrabble example demonstrated that real Americans didn’t accept handouts. “We’ve become a socialist state,” he lectured the group of educators. “We ought to rely on family, church, and community first.”
The third anecdote, according to many observers, accounted for his decade of deportation mania and informed the back story of SB 1070. Speaking at the Brookings Institution on the issue of illegal immigration in Arizona on a cold December day in 2004, Pearce was notified mid-speech that his wife had called and left an urgent message. Pearce stopped, stepped away from the podium, and phoned home. His son Sean, an eleven-year veteran of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and the SWAT team, had been shot in the gut after he broke through the door of a mobile home to serve a search warrant. The twenty-two-year-old shooter, who eventually received a fifty-one-year prison sentence, had been an undocumented resident from Mexico. “It verified what I’m trying to do down here,” Pearce told a local journalist. He added hauntingly, “You couldn’t have scripted it any better.”
A year later, after speaking at a Minuteman Project rally at the Arizona state capitol and receiving a “rock-star cheer,” Pearce weaved that script into a chronicle of a deportation policy foretold. “If I was the governor,” he told the Arizona Republic, essentially mapping out a strategy that would eventually ensnare Governor Jan Brewer into the SB 1070 campaign, “the first thing I’d do is put the National Guard on the border, assign patrols and really beef it up.” In an eerie foreshadowing of the Secure Communities program, Pearce called for local law enforcement agencies to be fully empowered with the ability to arrest immigrants without proper documentation. (Secure Communities, launched by the Bush administration in 2008 but dramatically ramped up under Obama, builds on the Bush-era 287(g) federal initiatives—which deputized county and city agencies to enforce immigration law—by giving local agencies access to federal criminal and immigration databases.)
And then came the kicker: “I’d declare an emergency under federal law,” Pearce said, “because of the impact of a billion-dollar cost to the criminal justice system, to the health care system and the education system.”
Mr. Welty: Have you any wetbacks in Arizona?
Mr. Hayden: No, sir; that is a term with which I am not familiar.
ARIZONA DEMOCRAT CARL HAYDEN, ANSWERING A QUESTION FROM OHIO DEMOCRAT BENJAMIN WELTY IN TESTIMONY BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION’S HEARING ON THE “TEMPORARY ADMISSION OF ILLITERATE MEXICAN LABORERS,” FEBRUARY 2, 1920
“While SB 1070 has garnered unprecedented national attention,” Pearce told Politico readers in the spring of 2011, “it was not the law that ‘started it all.’” Five years earlier, on a warm fall morning, NPR listeners en route to work in Phoenix heard then State Representative Pearce discuss how he would reduce the flow of illegal immigration.
“We know what we need to do,” Pearce said from Mesa. “In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower put together a task force called Operation Wetback. He removed, in less than a year, 1.3 million illegal aliens. They must be deported.”
The media and Latino organizations jumped on Pearce for his use of the “wetback” moniker, but his brash call for a punitive deportation policy a half-century after Eisenhower’s reckless campaign seemingly drew less criticism. In truth, Pearce was sowing the seeds for SB 1070’s eventual harvest.
John Huppenthal, then a state senator from nearby Chandler, merely suggested that Pearce needed a “lesson in political correctness” to get his message across more effectively. Huppenthal had witnessed such a dragnet policy; in 1997, the police department in his district unleashed a five-day sweep and apprehended more than four hundred undocumented workers, ensnaring a passel of costly lawsuits over civil rights violations in the process.
But Pearce didn’t really need a lesson in political correctness; his point, as he later explained, had more to do with a delusional ’50s nostalgia. The term “wetback,” which referred to the Mexican crossing over the Rio Grande River, was merely the disparaging tag du jour, not unlike the use of “illegal” today.
Only two years after Barry Goldwater went to Washington as an Arizona senator, troubling circumstances across the nation led to one of the most disastrous and shameful episodes in the history of US immigration policy. With the country reeling from the postwar recession, Eisenhower followed the easy route of scapegoating and ordered the forced deportation of an estimated 1.3 million immigrants (many with American-born children and spouses) to Mexico.
On the heels of the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1952, which made it a crime to transport undocumented immigrants, among other measures, Eisenhower returned to his military roots for a drastic approach to dealing with Mexican laborers who had crossed the border through the Bracero Program during World War II. In 1942, while Eisenhower was serving as the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, the United States opened the border with Mexico in an attempt to fill a devastating labor shortage on some of the largest corporate farms in the South and Southwest. In truth, the influx of undocumented low-wage “braceros” overwhelmed the regulated numbers sanctioned by the two governments, and quietly provided the backbone for the nation’s agricultural industries in the 1940s.
Once the war was over and General Eisenhower marched into the White House, the critical legacy of guest workers quickly vanished into the cloud of economic displacement, union criticism over nonunion laborers, and the renewed charge from the Hoover days that “our government has become a contributor to the growth of an illegal traffic, which it has the responsibility to prevent.”
Eisenhower and his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, knew just the right man for the job: Army General Joseph Swing, who had cut his teeth in 1916 on the US invasion of Mexico and failed expedition to capture Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. Despite hundreds of missions by the First Aero Squadron (the first time Americans employed aircraft in battle), the first motorized combat vehicles, and five thousand troops from the American cavalry (including a young George S. Patton), Swing and famed General “Black Jack” Pershing exited from Mexico empty-handed. “We are now sneaking home under a cover like a whipped cur with his tail between his legs,” Pershing wrote at the end of the eleven-month invasion.
Nearly fifty years later, Swing wasn’t about to let the deviant Mexicans evade him again. In fact, his military blitz came on the heels of a decade-long shift in American border policy. As part of the conditions for the Bracero Program in the 1940s, the Border Patrol had already “committed itself to strengthen the Patrol force along the Mexican Border by the means of filling all existing vacancies and detailing approximately 150 Patrol Inspectors from other areas to the Mexican border,” according to historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez. For the first time since the birth of the Border Patrol in 1924, more guards were protecting our southern border than the Canadian stretches (which, in fact, had presented a larger problem with bootleggers in the 1920s).
In a study on “Operation Wetback,” Hernandez noted that the new focus on the southern frontier had historical ramifications: “First, the number of apprehensions of deportable aliens made by U.S. Border Patrol officers in the Mexican border region increased from 11,775 in 1943 to 28,173 in 1944. Although a rise in undocumented Mexican immigration certainly did occur during the 1940s, the quiet emergence of a U.S. Border Patrol priority to apprehend Mexican nationals combined with new strategies contributed to the dramatic boom in the number of apprehensions made in the Mexican border region.”
It also set the precedent for a detention and deportation policy that would endure until today. Hernandez concluded:
With cross-border collaboration, however, U.S. and Mexican officers were able to transform the line that marked the limits of their jurisdictions into a bridge that linked rather than divided the two distinct systems of migration control. Upon that bridge the consequences for unsanctioned border crossing were merged. No longer were the detentions and dislocations that accompanied migration control isolated within one nation or territory. In the United States, those identified as illegal immigrants were subject to surveillance, detention, and deportation. In Mexico, they would face the disruptions and anxieties of forced dislocation to unfamiliar places. In each location, however, the consequences of having committed the symbiotic crimes of unsanctioned emigration and undocumented immigration were bound together through the collaborative practices of U.S.-Mexican migration control.
By the mid-1940s, the US had set up 4,500 feet of chain-link fencing near the border town of Calexico, California, as an experiment forcing illegal entrants to divert into more dangerous desert corridors. (President Bill Clinton’s Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 took this approach to even further extremes.)
Utilizing all the military hardware available to him for the air, land, and sea, along with nearly 1,000 Border Patrol agents, Swing essentially ramped up what had been an increasing militarization of the border, and brought his dragnet of roadblocks and door-to-door sweeps primarily to Mexican American and immigrant communities in Arizona, Texas, and California. Bringing along the media, he intentionally turned his brutal sideshow into a media event that captured the nation’s attention.
In the spring of 1954, before Operation Wetback, the Stanford Law Review published a controversial essay aptly titled “Wetbacks: Can the States Act to Curb Illegal Entry,” which aired a sentiment about states’ rights and immigration policy that hauntingly foreshadowed the SB 1070 debate. The Review asked: Could unilateral state policy on immigration ultimately impact federal decisions? “Obviously the problem is one which is within the power of the Federal Government to meet, and which the Federal Government is best able to meet,” the legal journal noted. “Yet political pressures have been sufficient to forestall any forceful legislative attack on the situation. Congress even has evinced a willingness to weaken further its already over-extended border enforcement agencies to placate interest groups. Meanwhile the Wetback invasion in its current proportions constitutes a critical threat to the health, safety and general welfare of the people of the border states. Can the states act to meet this threat? Or is the field one in which the doctrine of federal supremacy admits only the exercise of national power?”
The Review posited the case of the Chinese in California—“the original wetbacks”—as a precedent for states’ rights being used as an impetus for greater federal action on immigration policy with Mexicans, the new wetbacks.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century California faced a problem of Chinese immigration strikingly similar to that now posed by the Wetback. In 1891 a statute was passed making it unlawful for “any Chinese person,” excepting only diplomatic envoys, to enter the state. All Chinese in California were required to secure certificates of residence which were to be exhibited, on demand, to any peace officer, and also, upon traveling, to any ticket agent or conductor. Failure to obtain and carry such a certificate was made an offense punishable by imprisonment or deportation. The California Supreme Court, in a summary one-page opinion, struck down the statute, saying, “The power thus attempted to be exercised is one which belongs exclusively to the general government by virtue of its authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”
A year later, of course, the Chinese Exclusion Acts passed through Congress, effectively outlawing migration from that country. A huge ocean notwithstanding, the Review wondered, Why can’t we carry out such a definitive policy with Mexicans?
Swing would have agreed with such a sweeping approach. Placing Mexican barrios “under a state of siege,” he unleashed his campaign with the fervor of ending migration from Mexico forever. However, his roundup or forced repatriation of more than 1 million Mexican immigrants was as effective as the illusory attempt to capture Pancho Villa: a lot of military show that delayed the inevitable. Villa became a hero; deported Mexicans would pack up their belongings and return to the US.
Hernandez concluded, “Instead of being a major law enforcement campaign, the summer of 1954 can better be understood as a massive publicity campaign for what had happened the year before and a public claiming of migration control by the U. S. government despite the critical contributions and participation of the Mexican government.”
“The so-called wetback problem no longer exists,” Swing insisted in 1954. “The border has been secured.”
More than fifty years later, the defiant Pearce floated this same banner in 2006, telling anyone who would listen that Operation Wetback was “a successful program for those who continue to tell you it’s impossible to deport [illegal immigrants] in this country.”
Arizonans would eventually listen to Pearce. Like the Californians’ dalliance with their own private Chinese exclusion acts, SB 1070 challenged the nation with its attack on federal jurisdiction.
Randy Parraz sat in the meeting room of a local union headquarters in Phoenix, a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. above his head. Preoccupied, as if always in the middle of carrying out an action, he fidgeted in his seat, gazing intensely at the camera.
“It’s not where you come from,” he said, speaking at a machine-gun pace, “but what you dedicate your life to.”
Parraz had dedicated his life to his two little girls, which brought him back to Arizona in 2007 after a divorce. He had first arrived in Arizona in 2002, signing on as the state director for the national AFL-CIO, but a career in the labor movement had left him dissatisfied with its effectiveness for change.
“Labor is so beat-up,” he went on, shaking his head. “Lack of vision, lack of leadership, afraid to deal with immigration.”
This frankness about Parraz, his brash take-no-prisoners approach to community organizing, had set him apart from the entrenched but paralytic Democratic establishment in Arizona. He remained the ultimate outsider who riled insiders with his indifference to protocol. Yet his passion and sense of purpose, and his brilliant organizing tactics, had attracted a growing following of young Latinos and liberal baby boomers that inspired a rebirth of activism in the state.
“We have to create our own story,” Parraz offered.
Parraz’s own story was impressive. Raised in Sacramento, California, he had earned a law degree from Boalt Law School at the University of California, Berkeley, then pursued a Masters in Public Administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Inspired by Ernesto Cortés of the Industrial Areas Foundation and the teachings of Harvard’s Marshall Ganz, a legendary community organizer and colleague of United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, Parraz found himself easing into the stream of community organizing jobs in Texas, Washington, DC, and then Arizona.
When he witnessed the faltering pushback on SB 1070, he shifted from his behind-the-scenes community organizer role to that of a public figure. “There are certain roles you have to take when no one else is ready to take it on,” he said.
Parraz was outraged by the Democratic Party’s failure to “rise to the challenge” in Arizona and confront the misinformation over SB 1070. “They saw it as a burden and walked away. I said, ‘Hey, let’s use this as an opportunity to organize.’ There were a lot of good people in the state who stayed quiet.”
“The signing of SB 1070 was the turning point for Randy Parraz,” the Three Sonorans blog noted, introducing him to Tucson voters in the summer of 2010. “As he said during his interview with Arizona Illustrated, his own personal threshold of injustice had been passed, and there was no strong voice against the bill from the Democratic candidate against John McCain, a supporter of the bill, so Randy decided to enter the race.”
Parraz failed to win the Democratic nomination for the Senate; but as he predicted, the state Democratic Party lost every statewide race. In the meantime, Parraz had awakened the interests of a new generation of activists in the state.
“One thing that becomes clear is that Randy Parraz is not your typical politician,” Three Sonorans continued.
Parraz continues in the tradition of Cesar Chavez, with a proven record of fighting for civil and labor rights and fasting when needed. Not many politicians will go a day or two without food, but this type of dedication speaks to the true motivations of Randy Parraz. His campaign is not about personal ambition, it’s about fighting against injustice for the people. These are special times in Arizona, and whoever we elect this year will lead Arizona into its 100th birthday and second century of existence. Will we continue with the status quo, the likes of McCain, Brewer, Pearce, Arpaio, etc., or will Arizona bring in a new batch of leaders to take this state in a new direction?
“You drop a frog in boiling water,” Parraz said, holding his hands together, “and it immediately jumps out. But if you put a frog in room-temperature water for eight hours and then gradually raise the heat, by the time the water is boiling his legs will be paralyzed and he wouldn’t have noticed the change. That’s what happened in Arizona.”
“I’m trying to get people to behave differently,” he went on. “To take risks. To protest. To tell the police to back off if they threaten your right to speech. I almost got arrested today for bringing people into the Arizona Capitol lobby. That’s how insane it is here. We were just bringing people in to educate about the jobs bill. This place is on lockdown, and we have to change that.”
For Parraz, that change came with the ascendancy of Russell Pearce to the State Senate presidency in the fall of 2010. Once the Tea Party president made it clear that he planned to pursue his radical agenda in the spring of 2011, Parraz and Chad Snow mobilized their supporters in the area to launch a recall.
Citing “insurmountable odds,” the Democratic Party leadership and established media gave Parraz and his Citizens for a Better Arizona hardly any support or a sporting chance to take down the most powerful politician in Arizona. They didn’t realize Parraz had done his homework. With the Republican Party increasingly in disarray, he saw that the Tea Party’s grip on the conservative ranks was slipping; his early canvass teams reported back the surprising discovery that one out of every three or four voters in the district didn’t even know Pearce.
“It takes a lot of work,” Parraz admonished, especially to assemble a bipartisan effort. “What issue will drive them? How do you engage people in the act of politics? How do you create opportunities for people to act on their values?”
Parraz and Snow and their increasing ranks of volunteers mulled over these questions as they set up their tables in front of the Mesa Public Library to collect signatures, and then launched a door-to-door campaign. They set up a Facebook page that soon exploded with participants. Suddenly, they found themselves joined by a regular crew of retired educators and business people who were outraged by the toll that Pearce’s ideological stance was taking on the economy and greater community, including disgruntled Republicans who found his Tea Party leadership out of step with traditional conservatism as well as Latino activists and younger voters anxious to take down the architect of SB 1070.
Little did they know that their efforts would snowball within weeks, thanks to social media networks that quickly spread the blogs, meeting updates, and recall petition achievements far beyond traditional political campaigns. “Randy had arrived in the precise moment,” Snow said, “when we needed more profiles in courage.”
A long-distance runner and Vietnam veteran, Alfredo Gutierrez once recalled outpacing security guards to deliver fliers and leaflets on behalf of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers in the 1960s. In fact, the Chicano activist hadn’t stopped running since those days.
“I started registering voters in 1968,” he told E. J. Montini at the Arizona Republic. “Always with the promise and the expectation that our time was coming. I never expected it to take this long.” For the former Democratic State Senate leader, SB 1070 was just the latest in a long string of extremist anti-immigrant measures that had kept him in politics all these years.
“In the long run, this will blow up in Pearce’s face,” Gutierrez said. “With the national focus on our state and the damage to our reputation, some fair and some not, as the Mississippi of this century—that can’t be good for business.”
Gutierrez spoke from experience. In the 1970s he protested another Arizona law that had criminalized largely immigrant communities and inflicted punitive measures to keep them at large and afraid.
A pull quote from BusinessWeek in the summer of 1972 testified to the state’s vanguard role in influencing the rest of the nation: “Arizona-type legislation is spreading to many other farm states, despite protests.”
Chavez returned to his native Arizona on May 11, 1972, ostensibly to hammer out a compromise over labor rights with Governor John “Jack” Williams. Called “One-Eye Jack” by some, Williams had surmounted a hardscrabble past to become one of the most popular radio voices in Phoenix—eventually he became the city’s mayor, and then governor. He had lost one eye as a child, and wore a dark lens over one side of his glasses. A conservative Republican, he famously signed off his radio programs with the line “It’s another beautiful day in Arizona. Leave us all enjoy it.” Of course, Williams wasn’t promising a beautiful day for all Arizonans.
Spurning a meeting with Chavez, Williams hastily signed HB 2134, an antiunion bill that essentially banned secondary boycotts and strikes during harvest time, cracked down on collective bargaining rights and union membership procedures, and made it a crime to make “misleading” speeches about boycotted products. It also prevented the United Farm Workers from organizing a union in the country’s second-largest lettuce-producing state.
Speaking in Tucson after signing the bill, Williams dismissed the growing crowd of farmworkers, union activists, and Mexican American and Yaqui representatives outside his building. He stated to the media, “For me, those people don’t even exist.”
Chavez immediately announced his plans to launch a boycott of Arizona’s lettuce, and to conduct an open-ended fast in protest. He called it a “fast for love.”
“The fast was started to create the spirit of social justice in Arizona and to try by our efforts through the fast and our sacrifices to erase the fears that the growers and the Republican legislators and the Republican governor have of the Union,” he reported in El Macriado, the official news organ of the union. “The fast is to try to reach the hearts of those men, so that they will understand that we too have rights and we’re not here to destroy, because we’re not destroyers, we’re builders.”
For Chavez, whose grandfather had built the family’s first home in Arizona three years before it became a state in 1912, Williams’s act was subversive and “un-American.” He declared the bill was “discriminatory” and aimed at “farmworkers who are Black, Brown and Indian.” He added: “No other labor force is asked to live with these repressive measures.”
Chavez, like every farmworker and many observers across the country, recognized the underlining focus of this bill—not unlike SB 1070, it was intended to keep the cheap labor of largely Mexican and Mexican American migrant workers in a state of fear.
“When 70 percent of the labor force lives in fear of being deported,” declared El Macriado, “there are no cries to end child labor, no demands for drinking water, no petitions for toilets, no protests against the foul conditions of the labor camps.”
By effectively outlawing the United Farm Workers’ efforts to unionize, the newspaper went on, the state of Arizona “does not admit that 100,000 illegal aliens enter each year to slave in the fields, live in the squalor and be thrown out of the country penniless when the crops are harvested.”
Arizona became the national “showdown” Chavez and the United Farm Workers had come to expect. But his campaign was not limited to simple collective bargaining demands. Nor did he see the farmworkers as in need of liberation—just the opposite. “Somehow,” Chavez wrote, “these powerful men and women must be helped to realize that there is nothing to fear from treating their workers as fellow human beings.”
Born in his family’s home in Yuma in 1927, Chavez was no stranger to such a showdown. His grandfather had fled a fate in servitude to northern Mexico’s most infamous land barons, the Terrazas family, who controlled an estimated 7 million acres of Chihuahua during the three decades of the Díaz dictatorship. (The Terrazas patriarch had once said, “I’m not from Chihuahua, Chihuahua is mine.”) Chavez’s father, though, was saddled with debt after a land deal went bad, and he eventually lost the family property and beloved fields in Yuma to a vindictive grower (or large farmer) in 1939. While his father struggled to collect enough loans to cover his back taxes, the grower bulldozed the trees on the property and filled in the irrigation ditches.
“When we were pushed off our land,” Chavez said, “all we could take with us was what we could jam into the old Studebaker or pile on its roof and fenders.”
Chavez’s family crossed into California and into another state of existence. “When we left the farm,” Chavez wrote, “our whole life was upset, turned upside down. We had been part of a very stable community, and we were about to become migratory workers. We had been uprooted.”
Nonetheless, the young boy quickly learned that discrimination and civil rights had more to do with ethnicity than a home address. And he learned what citizenship meant in Arizona; the family had to dodge the Border Patrol and police, Chavez recalled, because “they don’t distinguish between Mexicans and Mexican Americans. As far as they are concerned, we can’t be a citizen even though we were born here. In their minds, ‘if he’s Mexican, don’t trust him.’”
By the time he reached eighth grade, Chavez had dropped out of school to work full-time as a migrant worker in the fields of California. After a stint in the Navy, he returned to California, where he became an organizer with the Community Service Organization, dealing with labor rights and abuses. In 1962 he and Dolores Huerta cofounded the National Farm Workers Association, which became the United Farm Workers. Chavez drew national attention three years later, when the United Farm Workers led a successful national boycott of grapes in an effort to gain living wages and safer working conditions.
Like Martin Luther King Jr., Chavez was deeply influenced by the writings and life of Mahatma Gandhi. He used nonviolent strategies of boycotts, civil disobedience, and strikes to agitate for better working conditions for migrant workers. His most effective weapon, in the end, was his act of fasting, which he regarded as a spiritual endeavor as much as a political tool.
But first, he had to convince his own followers, especially in his native state.
In many respects, Chavez experienced the same level of apathy and the same vacuum of leadership that dogged Parraz’s and other recall efforts. “In Arizona,” he wrote, “the people were beaten. You could see the difference. Every time we talked about fighting the law, people would say, ‘No se puede, no se puede’—it’s not possible. It can’t be done.”
Meeting with his union staff at a hotel in Wickenburg, west of Phoenix, Huerta flipped the lament on its head. “From now on,” she said, “we’re not going to say, ‘No se puede’; we’re going to say, ‘Sí se puede.’” Chavez introduced this slogan at his next meeting in Phoenix—an inspiring and enduring sentiment that would be adapted by President Obama’s “Yes we can” presidential campaign in 2008.
Basing his operations in Arizona at the Santa Rita Center, in a barrio on the south side of Phoenix, Chavez inspired the demoralized activists in the state with his determined campaign. The Santa Rita Center filled every evening with the air of a revival—not of some evangelical breakdown, but a reminder of the Chicano community’s faith. Historian Christine Marin recalled attending the center’s gatherings as a young student and the towering role of Chavez in that period:
Large crowds packed into the Santa Rita hall, eager to catch a glimpse of the man who had dared to challenge Arizona’s governor. Farm workers and their families from throughout the state came to the center, and to attend the nightly mass. There were rugged-looking men, many with sunburned faces. They were working men. Their shirts, open at the collar, their sleeves rolled up. The women were dressed in simple, no frill dresses, many wearing blouses and skirts. Little girls held candles. Metal chairs were arranged in rows and rows, filling the hall, and every chair was filled. People stood along the walls, hugging every inch of space. When father Joe Melton blessed the wine for the sacrament, the priest told us that this was no ordinary wine, but wine harvested by men and women, working in dignity, under the protection of a union contract. And the hymns sung at the mass were union hymns, sung in English and in Spanish. . . . Then, a silence settled the room.
A group of people entered from another room, into the hall. You could hear a pin drop. And a short, small, weary-looking man appeared. He was assisted to his chair by others, their arms around his elbows and wrists. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I didn’t know who the men were. “Where is Cesar Chavez,” I asked myself. “Is that him?” I wondered; no one said a word. No one announced his presence to the crowd. There was no podium from where he could speak. I expected to see Cesar Chavez address the crowd from a podium. He walked, ever so slowly, to the chair, steadying himself against the men so that he wouldn’t fall. There was no voice from a microphone announcing his arrival, no applause from the crowd—just silence. It was like that almost every night: Cesar didn’t speak. But the crowd was satisfied just to be in his presence, to hear mass with him.
Chavez, though, was not only protesting Williams’s harsh legislation. Under his leadership, the United Farm Workers had launched an ambitious recall of the governor.
Another recall. Another Arizona campaign to send a message to the rest of the nation about right-wing extremism. The campaign transcended Williams. “Arizona continues as the political domain of the Goldwater machine,” El Macriado charged, “a grower-based product of a Republican Party-John Birch Society merger.”
“My major concern,” Chavez wrote in an open letter published in the United Farm Workers newspaper on June 9, 1972, “is not this particular Arizona law and the fast is not out of anger against the growers. My concern is the spirit of fear that lies behind the hearts of growers and legislators across the country.”
Barnstorming the state on flatbed trucks, setting up tables in the agricultural fields and barrio communities, volunteers with the farmworkers and their allies launched a major campaign to collect recall signatures and, more important, to register new voters in Chicano and Native American strongholds. The cry “Sí se puede!” rang out for the first time across the state—and the nation.
The evening meetings at the Santa Rita Center attracted national media, and social figures including Coretta Scott King, Joan Baez, and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. Huerta introduced Senator McGovern, declaring, “He does not stand with the Union only when the cactus is bearing fruit.” For his part, McGovern called Arizona’s bill a “regressive and unjust legislation that hampers the collective bargaining process and the rights of organized labor.”
Debilitated by his water-only fast, Chavez eventually became confined to the Santa Rita Center. He struggled with speech, weakened by the strain. After twenty-four days, he ended his fast at a special memorial service in front of five thousand people.
Meanwhile, the recall effort exploded. Organizers employed the tactics Chavez had used in California, going door-to-door and canvassing people in the churches and shopping centers. Within a few months, more than a hundred thousand signatures had been collected, including many from new voters. Chavez and Huerta recognized that their efforts were changing the state’s electoral demographics and reinvigorating the demoralized Democratic Party. For Chavez, the recall campaign had the effect of “waking up” the people. “It had never happened before in Arizona,” he noted in his memoir, “or anywhere.”
In the end, the organizers turned in more than 176,000 petition signatures, only 103,000 of which were needed to ensure the recall. In a bold manipulation of the process, though, county officials teamed up with the secretary of state to strike down 96,000 signatures as invalid. According to Attorney General Gary Nelson, “deputy registrars” were not legally permitted to collect petition signatures and register voters at the same time. Thanks to Williams’s Republican cronies, the recall had been derailed.
Months later, an appeal to the federal court would reverse the attorney general’s opinion. At that point, however, a recall election seemed futile in light of the upcoming elections. Nonetheless, “the effects on Arizona politics were tremendous,” Chavez wrote later in his life.
Chavez may not have won the recall, but he had inspired a new generation of activists in Arizona. Although Williams’s hard-line anti-union legislation would be fought in the courts for years, more than 150,000 new voters had signed up during Chavez’s campaign, ushering in a new era in 1974. The political victories for the new movement would include Raúl Castro’s election as the state’s first Latino governor.
During his 2008 presidential campaign, President Obama recognized the legacy of the Sí se puede movement in his own life’s work: “As farmworkers and laborers across America continue to struggle for fair treatment and fair wages, we find strength in what Cesar Chavez accomplished so many years ago. . . . And we should honor him for what he’s taught us about making America a stronger, more just, and more prosperous nation. That’s why I support the call to make Cesar Chavez’s birthday a national holiday. It’s time to recognize the contributions of this American icon to the ongoing efforts to perfect our union.”
They sat in the Citizens for a Better Arizona office like two bridge partners, giving each other a hard time for their individual tales. In many respects, the two women, Mary Lou Boettcher and Brenda Rascon, represented the diverse face of their hometown of Mesa. With large framed glasses, the white-haired Boettcher possessed the no-nonsense look of a librarian; in the 1960s, after arriving from Kansas, she had cofounded the first Republican Women’s Club in the area. With a wide smile and a vivacious demeanor, the thirty-year-old doctoral student Rascon and her family had been among the first Mexican immigrants to integrate their neighborhood. Her family had moved from Los Angeles in the 1990s, like many California transplants, in search of a quieter and more affordable way of life.
“Russell Pearce made me an activist and taught me about state politics,” Rascon said with a laugh. “The least I can do for my community is to make it better, especially in this period of negative rhetoric and . . . violence.”
Taking part in the recall movement, her first political campaign, Rascon also discovered the wonder of the democratic experience. “At the beginning, people didn’t know Pearce. Probably four out of ten had no idea who he was. Most people would say, ‘I’m not political,’ so I would go to the door, knock, tell what I’m doing, and then I would talk about education—and that would get their attention. People have the notion of politics as something dirty, and don’t see it as civic engagement. Through our canvassing, we didn’t just educate people about Pearce, but also the process of politics in their daily lives.”
For Boettcher, a retired librarian and educator, the campaign was also an opportunity to restore a sense of balance to the community’s school system, which had experienced draconian cuts under Pearce’s leadership.
“He’s too extreme,” she said. “I’m not trying to make history. I’m trying to make sure we have someone willing to help people who need help through our state legislature—that our children receive a good education.” Recalling Pearce, she added, was about the future of her grandchildren.
The wide streets of historic Mesa, lined with palo verde and palm trees, now gave way to the world they shared; once you pass the Tempe canal and head east on Main Street, the first llanteria (tire store) reminds you that the historic stronghold of the state’s oldest Mormon temple is now composed of a diverse and growing community, with 40 percent from Latino families.
According to historical Mormon texts, Mesa was originally envisioned as a way station for polygamist colonies en route to Mexico. When their communities in Utah began burgeoning with immigration and overpopulation problems in the 1870s, Mormon leader Brigham Young called on veteran traveler Daniel Jones to seek out land opportunities in the Yaqui country of Mexico, with an eye on an area in the Salt River Valley that could be “a station on the road to those who would later go onto the far south.”
In 1877, a year after Russell Pearce’s family migrated from Utah to northern Arizona, a party of Mormons established themselves in the Mesa area, clearing creosote bushes, digging out prehistoric Hohokam irrigation ditches, and planting gardens, shade trees, and fields of Hollyhocks.
The key to Mesa, of course, was the ancient canal, which diverted water from the Salt River. The first task was to found the Mesa Canal Company, following the tradition of Phoenix founder Jack Swilling, a Confederate deserter who dug out the first prehistoric canal in 1867 and shoveled that city into existence. From the ashes of the ancient civilization, so rose Phoenix. Swilling, a troubled morphine addict who suffered from an enduring brain injury, died in prison in 1878 for an apparent bungled robbery. When Mesa officially incorporated in 1883, the church listed “389 souls of our people” in the township—along with twenty-four non-Mormons.
Persecution was undeniably brutal for the Mormons in the first decade of their Arizona residency. Perhaps as a forerunner of the state’s trampling of federal jurisdiction, the territorial government of Arizona passed the Anti-Bigamy Act in 1885. The Edmunds Act in 1887 sent many polygamist Mormons across the border to Mexico; others were hauled off to prison. “Desperate diseases need desperate remedies,” railed St. John’s Apache Chief newspaper in 1884. “The Mormon disease is a desperate one and rope and shotgun is the only cure. The government refuses to do anything, and the ‘people’ of Apache County must do something or the Mormons will soon drive them out. Take the needed steps while it is yet time. Don’t let them settle on any more of our lands; don’t let them stop in Apache County; hang a few of their polygamous leaders, such as Jesse N. Smith, Udall, Romney, [John] Hunt and others of this nature and stop will be put to it.”
According to pioneering Mormon Daniel Webster Jones, the Mormons had meted out their own version of frontier justice in Mesa and across Arizona. “There was scarcely a week passed but what there were miserable petty charges brought against the Indians, often on the slightest ground,” he wrote. “Once the spirit ran so high against the Indian that it was determined to drive them away.”
Although cooler heads eventually prevailed, Mesa residents struggled with the contradictions of ethnic discrimination and civil rights for the next century, just like the rest of the United States. Locals drove out Chinese merchants in the 1890s; the tragic death of a young Japanese student gave a local elementary school its motto to “Carry on”; German “slackers” were rounded up and imprisoned during the hysteria of World War I; the Ku Klux Klan thrived in the 1920s; and the swimming pool remained segregated in 1953, the same year the local newspaper named African American school principal Veora Johnson the “citizen of the year.”
When Pete Guerrero was named Mesa’s man of the year in 1942, the Mesa Journal Tribune noted that he was active in the Alianza Hispano Americana—the first national Latino organization, which had been founded in Tucson. “Pete is doing noble work as a missionary to keep constantly before the Spanish-Americans the virtues of Americanism.”
At the time of Pearce’s recall, Main Street still led to the monumental Mesa Mormon Temple, with roughly thirty thousand Mormons, including children, making up 17 percent of the district. The Mormon Church still held a powerful sway over the Mesa community and decision makers, though it no longer represented a monolithic front with a single voice. On the immigration issue, in particular, a broad range of opinions emanated from the various communities and states. “Pearce is in the vast minority and reactionary extremist wing” of the Mormon Church, said fellow Mormon Chad Snow of the recall campaign. Still, for Snow, this didn’t mark a split in the church but rather a positive reflection of the wide spectrum of views.
In the summer of 2011, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officials in Salt Lake City released an official “new statement” on immigration matters, stressing four areas of clear difference with Arizona and Pearce’s punitive SB 1070:
Around the world, debate on the immigration question has become intense. That is especially so in the United States. Most Americans agree that the federal government of the United States should secure its borders and sharply reduce or eliminate the flow of undocumented immigrants. Unchecked and unregulated, such a flow may destabilize society and ultimately become unsustainable.
As a matter of policy, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discourages its members from entering any country without legal documentation, and from deliberately overstaying legal travel visas.
What to do with the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants now residing in various states within the United States is the biggest challenge in the immigration debate. The bedrock moral issue for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is how we treat each other as children of God.
The history of mass expulsion or mistreatment of individuals or families is cause for concern especially where race, culture, or religion are involved. This should give pause to any policy that contemplates targeting any one group, particularly if that group comes mostly from one heritage.
As those on all sides of the immigration debate in the United States have noted, this issue is one that must ultimately be resolved by the federal government.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is concerned that any state legislation that only contains enforcement provisions is likely to fall short of the high moral standard of treating each other as children of God.
The Church supports an approach where undocumented immigrants are allowed to square themselves with the law and continue to work without this necessarily leading to citizenship.
In furtherance of needed immigration reform in the United States, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints supports a balanced and civil approach to a challenging problem, fully consistent with its tradition of compassion, its reverence for family, and its commitment to law.
In the spring of 2011, for example, the state legislature in Utah followed Arizona’s state rebellion against federal jurisdiction over immigration policy but opted for a kinder, gentler approach to dealing with undocumented residents. Hailed as the Utah Compact, the law provided temporary residency permits for workers without proper papers, granted a limited form of amnesty for those who had entered illegally before a certain date, and narrowed obligatory residency status checks by law enforcement officials only in the case of felonies or serious misdemeanors. But like Arizona’s SB 1070, the Utah Compact was immediately halted by the courts.
“It’s not the Mesa I was raised in,” Pearce lamented in 2005, referring to the impact of immigrants in his hometown. “They have turned it into a Third World country.”
Not that everyone in Mesa agreed with his assessment. “It isn’t the Mesa he grew up in because Mesa is a huge, diverse community,” the town’s vice mayor, Claudia Walters, told the Tribune. “Mesa used to be a small town. And we are now the fortieth-largest city in the country. We have everything from million-dollar homes to people who, unfortunately, are living in bad circumstances.”
Indeed, it was Rascon’s and Boettcher’s Mesa, as well.
Pearce’s love of government, or rather his government, went too far in the spring of 2011. In the process, the first major crack in his invincibility made Arizonans sit up in their chairs for the first time in ages. For the Recall Pearce campaign, engaged in the tedious work of collecting petitions, it also signaled the beginning of the end of Pearce’s grip on the business community.
President Pearce was stunned on March 17, when his own Tea Party supporters lost their nerve and failed to pass what he had trumpeted as the “omnibus bill” on immigration—the mother of all anti-immigration bills.
And what a package it had been: the bills required hospitals and public housing operators to verify legal residency status or evict undocumented immigrants; the Department of Public Safety would have been granted the right to check fingerprint backgrounds to verify citizenship or legal residency; the state constitution would have prohibited any language other than English to be used in official state business; undocumented children would have been prevented from attending school; citizenship would have been denied to children of parents without proper papers; and undocumented immigrants would have been banned from driving or purchasing vehicles, and if they were apprehended, their cars would have been put up for sale.
No child—or immigrant—was left behind. But the children in Arizona didn’t let Pearce off the hook. On March 17, 2011, a parade of children dressed as firefighters, doctors, lawyers, police officers, pilots, and scientists, carrying signs including a thirty-foot banner of colorful hand prints, marched along the Arizona capitol grounds singing “This Little Light of Mine.” On the eve of the Arizona state legislature’s historic vote on this blockbuster bill, the kids held a symbolic sit-in on the capitol lawn with a reminder that no one would suffer more from the draconian bills than state’s youngest.
It was a stunning defeat for the Tea Party president, and it bolstered the energy of the Recall Pearce campaign. Even some of Arizona’s most conservative CEOs and Chamber of Commerce stalwarts had written the legislature before the vote to inform Pearce that they “strongly believe it is unwise for the Legislature to pass any additional immigration legislation, including any measures leaving the determination of citizenship to the state.”
Pearce took his stand. He was unmoved. “It took me a while on 1070, too,” Pearce scolded his fellow senators, referring to the controversial immigration bill. “I introduced it in ’05, ’06, ’07, ’08, ’09, and 2010 before we had a governor that would sign it. And we’ve become the envy of this nation, with twenty-five states writing legislation modeled after 1070.”
In an interesting ideological barb aimed at the business community, Pearce chastised the “profits over patriots” interests of corporations that had been dependent on cheap undocumented labor for more than a century.
The children taught Pearce a lesson on that fine spring day, though. “Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students,” Cesar Chavez once reminded the nation. “What better books can there be than the book of humanity?”
On the heels of an unforgiving year of outrageous state rebellion, children in Arizona had to create their own book of humanity—if only to defend their state’s diverse heritage and basic human rights. As part of the Repeal Coalition campaign in Arizona, a volunteer grassroots organization that was calling for the repeal of SB 1070 and other anti-immigrant laws, the children and youth opened a new chapter in the ongoing saga in Arizona. One banner simply asked, “Russell Pearce: Why Do You Hate Arizona’s Youth?”
“While I was disappointed with last week’s votes,” Pearce would write later in Politico, “it was not the last word on illegal immigration in Arizona. I am not backing off from demanding our laws be enforced. . . . We have fought these battles before and prevailed. We will prevail again.”
This time, however, Randy Parraz, Chad Snow, and their fervent recall movement presented the Tea Party president with an unprecedented challenge.
More than Parraz or anyone involved in the recall, Pearce must have been haunted by an earlier recall attempt: the campaign to oust one of his political heroes in Arizona in the 1980s. The two campaigns shared so many similarities that the first one served as a blueprint for handling the Tea Party takeover. It included a right-wing fringe politician who had captured the nation’s attention for his racial calumnies; an energetic recall organizer who was denounced as a “dangerous” outsider; a division within the Mormon Church between hard-line fundamentalists and moderates; a national boycott of the state over controversial race-based policies; and the involvement of Jan Brewer, who defended the disgraced but loyal Republican ally from her adopted hometown of Glendale.
In 1987, Arizona became the laughingstock of the nation. As one Republican state senator from Tucson remarked, the state once again had “a lock on the bigot vote, the anti-intellectual vote and the homophobic vote.”
The governor in question was Evan Mecham; his ghost still haunts the state.
It was his fifth attempt at the Arizona governorship—indefatigable car salesman that he was. While the endless delivery of the “Harold Stassen of the West” punch line provided some comic relief for the press (Stassen had been a perennial candidate for governor in Minnesota for decades), most cynical observers forgot one important detail: Stassen actually got elected as governor for one term in 1939.
So did Mecham, the Glendale auto dealer whose primary upset against Republican boss and Statehouse Majority Leader Burton Barr stunned the state in 1986.
With President Ronald Reagan’s blessing and US Senator Barry Goldwater’s endorsement, Mecham’s long-shot candidacy turned into a Cinderella story for the nation’s right-wing fringe. In a special appeal, Reagan told the voters of Arizona on October 14, 1986, “This year’s election could mark a turning point in our country’s history.” He warned voters to choose the “right track” and turn away from policies of “weakness and ridicule abroad.” Domestic ridicule would abound. “With me in the race,” Mecham declared, “we’re not just going to talk about water and air and nice things like that.”
Taking advantage of a split vote between the Democrat and a liberal independent candidate, Mecham kept his word as he coasted to victory in the fall of 1986. In truth, the majority of Arizona voters (more than 60 percent) stayed home. Within days, the car salesman-cum-governor made good on his promise not to talk about “nice things like that” and managed to turn Arizona into a “Circus Maximus,” in the words of venerable Arizona Congressman Morris K. Udall.
“Would You Buy a Used Car from This Governor?” The mocking headline by the San Francisco Examiner, nearly a year after Mecham’s shocking victory, underscored a level of national scorn and derision that calls to mind the state’s more recent debacle over immigration policies. Jon Stewart and The Daily Show would have had a bottomless well of material.
In Mecham’s case, however, the nuttiness of his character somehow tempered the anger—or at least made it secondary to his nonstop tendency, as his press secretary once noted, “to put his foot in his mouth.” Mecham was already known for his B-movie Pontiac car TV commercials; at first his folksy character and gaffes almost charmed cynics and pundits alike, providing a lifetime of jokes and one-liners. His descent into national buffoonery seemed inevitable—even welcomed.
Within days of his inauguration, though, the invective in the jokes mirrored the increasing division and extremist overtones in Mecham’s train wreck of an administration. What a shame to waste a $400 toupee on a two-bit head! Did you hear that Mecham ordered the U. of A. School of Agriculture to develop chickens with only right wings and all-white meat? Why did Mecham cancel Easter? He heard the eggs were going to be colored.
Born in rural Utah in 1924, Mecham had a childhood that was fairly typical of the Mormon West. He served in World War II and earned a Purple Heart after being shot down in Europe. He returned to the States, got married, became a lay bishop in his Mormon church, moved to Arizona to raise his large family, and soon launched a car dealership in the remote mining town of Ajo, near the US-Mexico border.
After losing a race for the Arizona House of Representatives, Mecham moved to the Phoenix suburb of Glendale and opened a new Pontiac dealership. Cars may have been his business, but politics was his first love. He finally managed to get elected to the Arizona State Senate in 1960, only to launch an ambitious campaign for the US Senate against the state’s (and arguably one of the Senate’s) most legendary Democrats, Carl Hayden, in 1962. (Elected as the first Representative from Arizona in 1912, Hayden became the longest-serving member of Congress, lasting a full fifty-seven years, until 1969.) Mecham ran on an anti-communist campaign to get the United States out of the United Nations; he was trounced, but the loss opened the chute for a twenty-five-year escapade of nonstop losing campaigns.
Until 1986. Running largely to get payback for the “ambush” of an earlier run for governor, Mecham targeted the seemingly invincible Republican leader Barr. He blasted Barr for “perfidy” and proclaimed he would bring an end to an era of “hidden and secret government control.” To the amazement of the Republican machine, Mecham won.
Not that it surprised Mecham, who reportedly told one of his assistants of his heavenly connections on the eve of the election: “I have assurance that I am going to win.”
Mecham’s appointees could have done with a bit more secrecy in ushering in a new era on January 6, 1987. Even People magazine couldn’t resist running a list of Mecham’s eyebrow-raising cabinet assignments: “Appointed to the state Board of Education a woman who reportedly described the ERA campaign as a lesbian plot. . . . Nominated as director of revenue a man whose company was $25,000 in arrears on unemployment compensation payments.” Some appointments were almost uncanny in their contradictions: Mecham’s main adviser on education lectured a legislative committee on the failings of schools and declared, “If a student wants to say the world is flat, the teacher doesn’t have the right to prove otherwise.” A convicted felon was asked to head up prison construction. The head of Mecham’s fan club turned out to be a child molester. Time magazine called Mecham’s nominee for a state investigator “a former Marine who had been court-martialed twice. The Governor’s special assistant went on leave after being charged with extortion. Such blunders have prompted publication of a hot-selling Evan Mecham joke book. One entry: ‘What do Mecham’s political appointees have in common? Parole officers.’”
These were pardonable offices compared with Mecham’s bullheaded implementation of the religious right wing’s extremist ideas. Mecham’s insurgent campaign, a precursor to the Tea Party, had railed against the Republican establishment in Phoenix and laid the foundations for a popular revolt “committed to the Constitution, traditional American values, and cleaning up our widespread drug problem and organized crimes,” according to the right-wing president of the Arizona Eagle Forum.
This popular revolt was launched at his inauguration. With Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints President Ezra Taft Benson standing at the podium, a prodigious moment that recognized Mecham’s “divine calling” to the seat of power, Mecham declared that his first major act in office would be to rescind former Governor Bruce Babbitt’s last-minute decree to enact an official Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Arizona.
Mecham didn’t simply rescind the holiday; he took one step further and declared, “I guess King did a lot for colored people, but I don’t think he deserves a national holiday.” Before too long, Mecham was also defending the use of the word “pickaninnies” for African American children in Cleon Skousen’s book The Making of America.
Whether or not Arizona was fed up with Mecham, national organizations and a host of celebrities led by Stevie Wonder quickly orchestrated a boycott of the state over the governor’s unabashed racism and holiday decision, and would even manage to get the National Football League to move the 1993 Super Bowl from Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe to Pasadena, California. Public Enemy sized up Arizona’s reputation with their single “By the Time I Get to Arizona” mentioning the “fact” that “the whole state’s racist.”
Whether or not they took umbrage at Mecham’s reckless appointments or discriminatory policies, it took little for the business community—still smarting from the defeat of their Republican stalwart Barr—to jump on the finger-pointing bandwagon.
One of the governor’s earliest critics was real estate developer J. Fife Symington III, who claimed that Mecham’s holiday debacle had resulted in at least forty-five convention cancellations and the loss of more than $25 million in revenue. He told Time magazine: “I think he’s had a really adverse effect on the business climate,” adding as an aside, “You’d have to live here to appreciate this comedy of errors.” (Symington went on to become governor himself in 1991, only to resign in disgrace for bank fraud.)
“He’s got the whole country laughing at us,” lamented Udall, “and you just can’t have that and attract the kind of new business you need.”
No one would argue with Udall’s liberal record, especially on civil rights, but his concern that Mecham had “damaged our image” spoke as much to the majority in the state that stayed at home during the elections and now rued Arizona’s scarred reputation—a hauntingly similar situation, in many respects, to post–SB 1070 Arizona, where empathy for the casualties of the right-wing agenda placed a distant second to the pocketbook and the media’s social register.
The coastal media in the Mecham era, as well, thrived on his gaffes and on the sociocultural implications of portraying Arizona as a backwater state. Doonesbury immortalized Mecham as a buffoon. Writing in the pop culture magazine Spin, Bart Bull updated the colorful portraits of New York City–based travel writers from a century ago:
Arizona is where the Old West crawled off to die. Or if not actually to die, then at least to establish a cranky early retirement. Arizona is God’s country, wide open spaces of desert so dry and hard and craggy that only the bravest, boldest and most devotedly crooked of developers dares plant a For Sale sign. Arizona is a man’s man’s No Man’s Land, where bikers gripe when they have to check their hogleg pistols before bellying up to the go-go bar to hoot at the tattooed topless cuties. Arizona is where the cactus meets the palm tree at poolside just the way God intended, where the Official State Tie is shaped like a noose, where the Mormons and the Mexicans and the Mercury dealers can all get together to agree on just exactly what kind of people we need less of around here.
Writing in the New York Times, Arizona-based author Alan Weisman transcended such caricatures and focused more on the transient “confusion of a state largely populated by recent arrivals whose self-interests replace roots and loyalties.” He wrote, “In the restless way of the Sun Belt, for every four who arrive in Arizona in search of quick success, three others leave. Although many recall supporters believe all will be solved if they get rid of the Governor, the casual, rootless regard many Arizonans have for their state creates opportunities for someone like him to thrive. Amid the passions of the recall, an unpleasant fact has been mostly overlooked: this year, Arizona’s legislature again failed to authorize a King holiday. And few frankly believe that it would pass a statewide referendum, which Mecham has proposed to settle the issue.”
Enter Ed Buck, a thirty-three-year-old millionaire entrepreneur in Phoenix, who told the New York Times, “Never before has one man alienated so many people in such a short period of time.” Buck was hardly alone. Beyond the Martin Luther King Jr. incident, the African American community didn’t know what to think of a governor who said he would willingly employ black people “because they are the best people who applied for the cotton-picking job.”
The Mexican American community took offense at Mecham’s rationale for selecting a TV weather anchor as his liaison to the Hispanic community: “I was so dazzled by her beauty,” he gushed, “I hired her on the spot.” Indeed, Mecham’s quip that his Pontiacs were “Mexican Cadillacs” always had people shaking their heads.
His views of those south of the border were not as sweet. Threatening to use the National Guard on the border, Mecham railed against Latin American revolutions and the “idea of communists parked in his nation’s back yard.” And when Japanese businessmen toured Phoenix with the governor, he remarked that they got “round eyes” when he showed off the city’s golf courses.
Among numerous other matters, Buck was personally offended by Mecham’s public disparagement of gays. The governor told one radio show, “If you are a member of the same church I am, you have evidently changed your lifestyle, because the church I belong to does not allow homosexuals to participate under any circumstances.”
Within seconds of the official 180–day waiting period, Buck decided that derision and shame did little to solve the state’s number-one nuisance: the Republican businessman, who happened to be gay, launched a recall campaign that sidestepped political affiliations and challenged Arizona’s costly apathy. Buck took no prisoners. He called Mecham a “Neanderthal who breeds paranoia and is a tragedy for this state.”
Everyone agreed. The Chamber of Commerce nodded in approval. Democrats turned their heads in glee. Nonetheless, Buck found himself alone on the next step: the Herculean task of collecting 220,000 verified signatures.
“Thirty days ago, when we started the Mecham recall movement, no newspaper, no political pro, no pundit, no columnist—no one except the participants gave us a chance,” Buck lectured in an op-ed in the Arizona Republic on August 16, 1987. “We were written off as crackpots.”
Within the first thirty days, he and a growing crew of volunteers had already gathered more than 103,000 signatures.
Buck didn’t pull any punches. A Republican maverick and an outspoken gay activist at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, he chastised state leaders for their “lack of courage.” The business community was too timid, and couldn’t get beyond “discussing” the recall to actually join it. The Democrats, paradoxically leery of losing Mecham as their target, were ineffective and “rent by infighting.” The rest of the Republican leadership had succumbed to “political prostitution.”
Buck issued a warning, which would resonate today in any state arena and certainly foretold a generation of lame Democratic politics in Arizona: “Those leaders who won’t lead are in danger of finding that no one pays attention anymore. The recall has done what it has done with grassroots people power—thousands of volunteers, hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, untold amounts of shoe leather and elbow grease and very little money.”
And they always had Mecham for inspiration: “Whenever we think this recall movement may be losing steam,” Buck joked, “Ev pulls us through.”
The governor didn’t just roll over and surrender. He countered every accusation; he defended his fiscal policies and balanced budget; he trumpeted his war on drugs and commitment to funding education. He was typically giddy when discussing the state’s new trade office in Taiwan. He took the cartoon depictions and punch lines in stride; he placed himself in good company, in line with the rest of the nation’s criticized leaders. “Who am I to be concerned about such attacks?” he told the New York Times. “Washington, a president elected by acclamation, was pilloried by journalists. And Lincoln: Terrible how they treated him. Jefferson’s friends begged him to crack down on the press. Nothing that’s worth doing ever comes easy. This doesn’t surprise me.”
Like Pearce, who attacked the “union thug” and “anarchist” Parraz, Mecham singled out Buck for his wrath—and his battle strategy. “The homosexuals sought me out,” he told the John Birch magazine. “The first element that we know that joined the recall effort was the National Gay Rights Liberation Movement. And the Democrats. And the pornographers. And the drug people, too—it’s a big business in Arizona, too big.”
Mechamites, as they were eventually called, got vicious. They distributed bumper stickers with the words “Queer Ed Buck’s Recall.” They warned Arizonans to watch out for petition gatherers, especially the gay liberation forces: “Be warned, you may get AIDS if the person that offers you the pen and petition to sign is a homosexual with the AIDS virus.”
Then they turned desperate. Once again like Pearce and his obsession with Parraz’s band of anarchists and socialists, Mecham railed against a left-wing conspiracy and leaned on his hard-line supporters to donate funds to counter the “militant liberals and homosexual lobby” that was leading the recall. He also wanted his followers to consider a radical move, literally: he sent a mailer to 25,000 right-wing patriots asking them to “pick up and move to Arizona.” Mecham wasn’t kidding: “That’s right. I want you to sell your house, pack up your belongings, quit your job, and come to the most beautiful state in the Union.”
In the end, Buck pulled off a miracle, but all in vain. His volunteer operation turned in more than 350,000 signatures—6,000 more than the votes Mecham had won in the election. He had taught the state an enduring lesson. “It is clear that those to whom Arizonans have traditionally looked for leadership lack the courage of their convictions,” he said. “It is clear that those who have captured Arizona—they of the rabid right—have used that apathy and lack of opposing leadership to ride their misguided, mean-spirited passions into the governor’s office. What should now be dawning on both groups is that something is happening out here. Something stirs deep within the body politic they have so long taken for granted.”
Before the scheduled recall election took place in the spring of 1988, the state legislature seized on allegations of improper loans and misappropriated campaign donations, and subsequent perjury charges, and slammed through a special impeachment trial in the spring. It provided an even greater media circus. Mecham was convicted for a handful of relatively minor charges, including the misuse of government funds and obstruction of justice. He was kicked out of office, and the recall was canceled. Secretary of State Rose Mofford, best known for her beehive hairdo, became the governor.
It took Arizona four more years before it finally passed Proposition 300, which made Martin Luther King Jr. Day a paid holiday. Mecham ran again for governor and the US Senate. He lost both elections. Buck eventually moved to West Hollywood, California.
“Truth be told,” concluded Pulitzer Prize–winning political cartoonist Steve Benson (the grandson of Mormon leader Ezra Benson), “Mecham was forcibly extracted from the governor’s chair after having been in office only 15 months and was later confined to the dementia unit of the Arizona State Veteran Home (suffering from a form of the affliction similar to Alzheimer’s disease), before dying in February 2008, a beaten, humiliated and broken man.”
Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson predicted that Mecham would never really go away: “The only problem now is how to make him disappear without heaping more scum and ridicule on Arizona’s image. . . . But Mecham will not go away. He is like one of those big pack rats. . . . Welcome to Phoenix: This is Mecham country.”
Or perhaps one could say: Mecham country became Pearce country. More important, a right-wing philosopher provided both men with the bedrock of their extremist ideas—and his legacy, thanks to Glenn Beck and Pearce, was once again shaping politics in Arizona and across the nation.
In the winter of 1987, while the snowbirds were ensconced in their rounds of golf, the precocious twenty-three-year-old Glenn Beck cruised into a new job in Phoenix in a DeLorean after successful stints as a shock jock in Corpus Christi and Louisville. Applying his zoo-show antics to the KOY airwaves, Beck sought to bring the FM station into first place among its competitors.
An admitted drug user and boozer, Beck was hardly the Christian warrior in those days. His brief radio hitch in Phoenix was a classic mix of rock ’n’ roll antics and gags, fueled by the excess of Arizona’s suburban sprawl.
It would take him another twenty years before he realized he had missed a titan of right-wing extremist philosophy in his very neighborhood. But Beck would more than make up for it. By 2007, the radio host had set out to make sure the rest of the nation discovered iconic fringe hero Cleon Skousen and his best-selling book, The 5,000 Year Leap.
Arizonans were a few leaps ahead of Beck. Although a few eyebrows were raised when Mormon President Ezra Benson appeared at Mecham’s divine-right inauguration, only a handful of people would have recognized another elder Mormon figure in the background of the Capitol celebrations. By the end of Mecham’s first year, though, Skousen had become almost a household name. Mecham’s gaffes made sure of that.
A Canadian by birth, Skousen has been described variably as a crackpot historian, an anti-communist conspiracy theorist, a constitutional scholar, and a latter-day conservative Mormon visionary. In the 1950s, after a fifteen-year stint as a clerk at J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI headquarters in Washington, Skousen launched a lifelong career as a special agent in the battle against the invasion of godless communism in everyday life. He called out President Eisenhower as a communist sympathizer; he railed against the plot for a worldwide collectivist society. In 1961 Time magazine hailed him as the “guiding light” among “rightwing ultras” and as “one of the busiest speakers in the rightist movement.” Time also mentioned that in 1960 Skousen had been fired as chief of the Salt Lake City police department, which he had operated “like a Gestapo,” according to the former mayor.
The darling of the John Birch Society, Skousen also cranked out a series of books that undeniably shaped two generations of extremist followers. In The Naked Communist, he called for a “war of ideologies” against a communist menace hell-bent on “the total annihilation of all opposition, the downfall of all existing governments, all economies and all societies.” In his speeches, he warned, “We should not sit back and wait for our boys and girls to be indoctrinated with materialistic dogma and thereby make themselves vulnerable to a Communist conversion when they are approached by the agents of force and fear who come from across the sea.”
By 1979, however, Skousen’s extremist views had alarmed the Mormon leadership enough that the church president’s office issued a special letter prohibiting any announcements of Skousen’s lectures under the auspices of the church or the use of church facilities for his followers’ meetings, though it did note that “this instruction is not intended to express any disapproval of the right of [Skousen’s] Freemen Institute and its lecturers to conduct such meetings or of the contents of the lectures.”
Just after rescinding Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Arizona, Mecham dropped another verbal bomb that kept him as a national punch line for days. When the Arizona governor casually defended the use of the word “pickaninnies” for African American children, he set off an investigation into the intellectual makeup of his increasingly wacky statements. The Mormon governor, in fact, was defending the work of his mentor Skousen, a regular visitor to Mesa and the Phoenix area, and someone Mecham considered a hero.
Only months before his election victory, Mecham had raved to the Arizona Republic, “I would enjoy being known as a protégé of Cleon Skousen. I have all of his books, suitably autographed. I’m a great fan of his, and we’re very dear friends.”
The “pickaninnies” gaffe had come from Skousen’s controversial book The Making of America, which invoked the term from a 1934 essay. As Alexander Zaitchik revealed years later in his extraordinary exposé on Skousen and Beck for Salon, “Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, The Making of America explained that ‘[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains.’”
In line with Mecham’s derogatory statements about King, Skousen believed that the civil rights leader was “a man who courted violence and night riding and broke the law to achieve his purposes; who found it expedient openly to collaborate with totalitarian Communism; and whose personal life was so revolting that it cannot be discussed.”
Nearly a quarter of a century after the Mecham debacle, Russell Pearce and his brother Lester joined ranks with Beck to make Arizona a hotbed of Skousenian disciples, revamping the old man’s soiled reputation and reintroducing his philosophies to a new generation of Tea Party activists in search of a handbook.
“Even before Obama’s inauguration,” Zaitchik wrote, “Beck had a game plan for a movement with Skousen at the center.” Introducing his “September 12th” movement, Beck informed his radio listeners that the first imperative was to “get The 5,000 Year Leap. Over my book or anything else, get The 5,000 Year Leap. You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. Please, number-one thing: inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. The 5,000 Year Leap is the first part of that.”
Thanks to Beck, Skousen’s books and seminars flourished among Tea Party offshoots across the country, including the Arizona Mainstream Project, which also focused on the communist conspiracy theories of Tucson’s Ethnic Studies Program.
A profile in the LA Times in 2011 noted that Pearce had “attended lectures by W. Cleon Skousen, a right-wing author and former FBI agent,” and shared Mecham’s sense of a “divine calling,” according to State Representative Bill Konopnicki, a fellow Republican who had challenged Pearce on immigration policy. (In retaliation for his opposition, Konopnicki claimed, Pearce instigated a series of threats against his family, an allegation Pearce denied.)
“I believe government is a creation of God,” Pearce had told an interviewer in Mesa. “It just must be limited.”
In the spring of 2011, in an article in The Nation, author Garrett Epps wrote about his experience at one of Lester Pearce’s Skousen trainings, where he learned that the “constitution is based on the Law of Moses; that Mosaic law was brought to the West by the ancient Anglo-Saxons, who were probably the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel; and that the Constitution restores the fifth-century kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.” Lester Pearce also noted: “Virtually all of modern American life and government is unconstitutional. Social Security, the Federal Reserve, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, hate crime laws—all flatly violate God’s law. State governments are not required to observe the Bill of Rights, and the First Amendment establishes ‘the religion of America,’ which is ‘nondenominational’ Christianity.”
Arizona Congressman Trent Franks, who listed his education at the Skousen-founded National Center for Constitutional Studies in Idaho as his main academic background, made national headlines in the fall of 2009 when he referred to President Obama as “an enemy of humanity.” Echoing Skousen’s depiction of slavery, Franks defiantly told a conference on abortion that “far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today,” referring to reproductive choice, “than were being devastated by the policies of slavery.”
Looking back at his short time in office in a 1988 interview in the John Birch Society’s New American magazine, Mecham concurred: “I’m a Constitutionalist. . . . The Constitution was inspired by God through people He raised up to give us the right amount of government. God gives us our freedom—if we’re smart enough to listen to Him, He’ll see that we have a type of government that will maintain that freedom for us. But, if we aren’t, He doesn’t send a legion of angels down to fight for us.”
For Pearce, those angels didn’t really include Mexicans or Mexican Americans or progressives. At the Skousen seminar, he reminded attendees, “I wrote a bill when I was in the legislature to give [the Gadsden Purchase] back to Mexico, because we had people in Tucson who were socialists.”
But the angels were fighting beside a lot of Skousen disciples—not just Glenn Beck and Russell Pearce. On the presidential campaign trail in Iowa in 2007, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a Mormon, praised Skousen as an influence during a radio interview. Like Romney’s ancestors, Skousen’s grandparents had fled to the Mormon colonies in Mexico. In fact, Pearce and Romney had both buried a secret about their ancestors’ arrival in the territory of Arizona.
As a fifth-generation Arizonan, Russell Pearce would never be confused with a carpetbagger, and he often invoked that history as a badge. But although Mexican American Studies advocates had to justify their history and counter interminable charges that Mexican American students were somehow outsiders or newcomers to the American experience, hardly anyone turned the mirror on a self-avowed nativist like Pearce.
A closer examination of Pearce’s family history revealed a dark tradition of violence and paranoia reminiscent of today’s approach to “outsiders.” The same could be said for the Romney family; few political observers knew of his ancestors’ dubious past in Arizona. Not that Romney had been forthcoming in his memoirs.
Statehood, secession, or theocratic empire—those appeared to be the three options facing Brigham Young and the Mormons in Utah in 1856, living on the harrowing edge of economic and agricultural ruin. When two Mormon apostles journeyed to Washington, DC, with their statehood petition, they hardly received a glance. Young went into overdrive and borrowed a page from Martin Luther, leading the Mormons into a spirit of Reformation. Bloody reformation.
As Will Bagley notes in his award-winning history, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, “Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Reformation was the Mormon leadership’s obsession with blood. Their rhetoric dripped with sanguine imagery, and their Old Testament theology incorporated this dark fascination in a perplexing doctrine known as blood atonement. . . . Of all the beliefs that laid the foundation of Utah’s culture of violence, none would have more devastating consequences.”
John D. Lee carried out this doctrine better than any follower. Abusive, ruthless, hated by his own community, the commander of the Mormons’ Fourth Battalion in southern Utah had an “autocratic style” matched only by the captain of his first company: Harrison Pearce.
A Georgia native, Pearce had converted to Mormonism in his twenties, and then migrated west with the exodus. A dedicated polygamist whose three wives would be listed on his tombstone, he settled in the fledgling cotton corridors of southern Utah. A carpenter by trade, he also served as a sheriff in Washington, Utah.
As the resentment against “gentiles” festered and talk spread that the US military was sharpening its bayonets for a possible invasion, stalwarts like Lee and Pearce readied themselves for a holy war. The presidential campaign of 1856 had set the stage: the time had come to end “the twin relics of Barbarism—Polygamy and Slavery.” The Mormons had staked their claims on the state sovereignty hopes of Senator Stephen Douglas. When President James Buchanan rode to victory, rumors of a Utah War—a Mormon War—spread like messengers across the plains.
To their great misfortune, a wagon party of Arkansas travelers knew nothing of the brewing storm over Zion. They just wanted to make it across the great desert and mountain range to the futureland of California. They set off in the spring of 1857 with their horses and cows, their children and wives, toting their rifles and the gullibility of those who believed in the great American migrant dream.
For Mormons like Lee and Pearce, the travelers represented an official invasion—or, simply, easy targets. Bagley posits, “If Brigham Young did not intentionally provoke a war with the United States, by early 1857 he was busily preparing for it.” Young braced his Mormon followers for an assault by President Buchanan’s federal troops just as his kingdom was unraveling on all sides.
As the Arkansas travelers unwittingly passed through Cedar City on their way to the Mountain Meadows, the Mormon leaders concocted tales of the travelers’ abuses and offenses, and fomented the suspicion that they planned to poison the local livestock and water sources. Lee assembled his troops; he recruited local bands of Paiute Indians. Regardless of the travelers’ intent or the lack of any acts of disparagement to the locals, the Mormons had drawn a delusional line in the sand and were determined to protect it.
Pearce declared his wish to “see all the Gentyles strippt naked and lashed on their backs and have the Sun scorch them to death by inches.” Paiutes and Mormons dressed as Indians launched the first attacks on the wagon train. Pearce and his son James, along with other Mormon militia reinforcements, soon arrived at the battleground. Over the next five days, the dwindling Arkansas parties held off the repeated attacks, even as their ranks diminished to a handful of men and mainly women and children. Lee eventually orchestrated a white-flag truce, claiming he would lead the party out of danger from the Indians if they disarmed. He ushered out the children and their mothers on a march for the last horrific minutes of their existence. The final call was made. The Mormons and their Indian allies swept down and carried out the massacre.
Years later, one of Brigham Young’s wives recounted her version of a story—never proved but often told—that Harrison Pearce had shot his own son when he attempted to save a young girl from a bloody death on that day. She cited a scar on his face as proof. One of Lee’s sons claimed that the elder Pearce had shot down the last standing child—a ten-year-old girl—when the son refused to carry out the dishonorable deed. In the end, 120 children, women, and men were massacred at Mountain Meadows. Their bodies were left to the ravages of birds and wolves and other wild animals.
Reports of the dark massacre eventually made their way to outer edges of newspapers in California; the Mormons manufactured denials, placed the blame on “savages,” or fabricated stories of attack and poisonous treachery by the travelers.
More than a year and a half after the disaster, an appointed judge and federal investigators waded among the blanched bones in Mountain Meadows, collected affidavits, and issued arrest warrants for the key militia leaders, including Pearce and his son. The judge declared that crimes had been committed by the “order of the council.” It would take another two decades before a single person—John D. Lee, who had fled to Arizona—was brought to justice.
Meanwhile, Brigham Young championed the prophetic outbreak of war back east. “There is no Union to leave; it is all disunion,” he declared. “Our Government is shivered to pieces, but the Kingdom of God will increase.”
With the masterful lies of an ancient mariner, and acting at Young’s behest, Lee took his wives (eight, according to some accounts) and extended family and moved to Arizona, where he established a crucial ferry on the Colorado River. Pearce did the same. In 1876, the same year Lee was sentenced to die for his solitary conviction of murder at the Mountain Meadows massacre, Pearce set up the historic “Pearce Ferry” on the northern edges of Arizona. Settlers began to pour into Mesa.
A bitter old man who finally admitted his mistakes, Lee was taken out to the desolated remains of the abandoned Mountain Meadows and executed by a makeshift firing squad on a brisk spring morning in 1877. Five years later, the elder Pearce petitioned his church to return to southern Utah. His son James, among others, had already launched a new era in Arizona history.
Mitt Romney’s family struggled to adjust to a new era in that same period. Their practice of polygamy was hardly news, of course. In the summer of 2011, as the Republican presidential primaries were heating up, the Washington Post ran a feature on Romney’s sizable family community in northern Mexico and the role of his great-grandfather Miles Park Romney, “who came to the Chihuahua desert in 1885 seeking refuge from U.S. anti-polygamy laws.”
But that was not quite the full story. Nor did a critical chapter on his family’s lawlessness in Arizona appear in Romney’s official version.
Only hours before one of the contentious Republican debates in the fall of 2011, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer formally petitioned the US Supreme Court to consider an appeal to a lower court’s decision on SB 1070. Brewer invoked state jurisdiction over immigration and police enforcement issues, just in time to thrust Arizona’s extremist immigration laws back into the national political arena.
Romney, in fact, had been the first Republican contender to speak in support of SB 1070, declaring that “Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law is the direct result of Washington’s failure to secure the border and to protect the lives and liberties of our citizens.” He did add, though: “It is my hope that the law will be implemented with care and caution not to single out individuals based upon their ethnicity.”
More than a century ago, Romney’s family wouldn’t have shared his concerns about border security. Consider his great-grandfather’s dalliance with Arizona laws. In his 2004 memoir, Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games, Romney recounts his version of his great-grandfather’s removal to Mexico:
Miles Junior was asked to move again, this time to build a settlement in St. Johns, Arizona. To every request, Romneys were obedient. And leaving behind all that they had worked to establish, they yet again pitched themselves against the arid terrain, the cactus, the alkali, quicksand, and rattlesnakes. They built schools and libraries. Miles Junior was the founder of a theatrical society on the frontier. He dug irrigation ditches and plowed up the desert soil.
Eventually Miles was called upon to settle in northern Mexico, where his son, my grandfather Gaskell, would wed and my father George would be born.
Romney concludes the story of his great-grandfather, who died in Mexico in 1904: “Despite emigrating, my great-grandfather never lost his love of country.” He may never have lost his love of the United States, but he didn’t leave Arizona on good terms—or legal ones.
In the 1880s, Mormons in Arizona didn’t just face persecution for their polygamy practices; they also faced resentment over their aggressive land deals and encroaching settlements. Five Mormons, including William Flake—the great-great-grandfather of Arizona Republican Representative Jeff Flake, who ran for a Senate seat in 2012—were convicted of unlawful “cohabitation” in 1884 (instead of violating the Edmunds Act, which outlawed polygamy) and sent to prison. In a related land claims dispute involving Miles P. Romney, Mormon leader David Udall—the great-grandfather of US Senators Tom Udall, a Democrat from New Mexico, and Colorado Democrat Mark Udall—was sent to prison in Detroit on perjury charges. (Udall, who had apparently considered fleeing the country, was later pardoned by President Grover Cleveland.)
Romney’s ancestor took a different option. Faced with the same perjury charges over his land claim in St. Johns, Arizona—rivals had accused of Romney of failing to reside continuously on a 160-acre ranch—Romney went on the lam in the spring of 1885 and forfeited more than $2,000 in bond when Udall warned him that federal marshals were en route to his home (according to Udall’s diary). A local newspaper wrote that Romney’s flight left his community “in the lurch.”
Writing in the Journal of the Southwest in 1977, in their article “Prosecution of the Mormons in Arizona Territory in the 1880s,” Mormon historians JoAnn Blair and Richard Jensen spelled out Romney’s break from Mormons who willingly faced the legal system in Arizona: “Romney had fared well in the earlier legal proceedings for the same alleged offense, partly because, he claimed, he had paid ‘several hundred dollars to grease the wheels.’ But this time he was less confident of success. . . . Fearing he would be prosecuted for polygamy, as well as for the earlier charge of perjury regarding his land claim, Romney skipped bond and fled to Mexico.”
Years later, Mitt Romney attempted to use the same issue to bolster his immigration hard-liner bona fides. Calling out New York City, San Francisco, and other cities for passing sanctuary policies in the past, he declared, “Sanctuary cities become magnets that encourage illegal immigration and undermine secure borders.” In his memoir, he casually overlooks the reality of Mexican sanctuary cities and his family’s history, and picks up the story from the border as seen through the eyes of one of Miles P. Romney’s wives: “Theirs was a life of toil and sacrifice, of course, of complete devotion to a cause. They were persecuted for their religious beliefs but they went forward undaunted. Despite emigrating, my great-grandfather never lost his love of country. He had an abiding loyalty to America and a deep interest in politics.” Romney concludes: “These were the same values and commitments that animated my grandfather and my father and my mother. They were the same values that were passed along to me.”
Values, as in seeking out sanctuary cities? Or supporting Arizona’s SB 1070 and strict enforcement of the border?
Romney’s ancestors had a slightly different take on border security and sanctuary. Having sided with Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, Romney’s Mormon clans fled their homes and ranches in 1912 when the Mexican Revolution came to town. Fleeing back across the US border, the thousands of Mormons appreciated the porous border and sanctuary cities—and more than $20,000 allocated by the US government for aid and relocation efforts.
In the heat of the Republican primary Romney declared, “It is my hope that the law will be implemented with care and caution not to single out individuals based upon their ethnicity. . . . It is increasingly clear that the time has come for Washington to fulfill its responsibility for border security.” When he emerged as the Republican presidential candidate, he went one step further: taking on SB 1070 author Kris Kobach as his immigration policy adviser, he embraced an “attrition through enforcement” policy that held up Arizona as a role model. Romney and the Republican Party would strongly base their immigration policies on SB 1070.
To be sure, in the spring of 2012, Russell Pearce announced to Tea Party activists in Gilbert, Arizona, that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s “immigration policy is identical to mine.”
The opening salvo in the 2012 elections arguably came on May 30, 2011. That day, scores of people representing Citizens for a Better Arizona poured into the cramped foyer of the secretary of state’s office with the rush of a rave. The room swelled as media cameras flashed from the corner posts; state employees peered from the receptionist’s open counter to witness the intrusion. Even the security guards smiled.
A stand of children suddenly emerged, a grinning mob in pink ribbons and dresses and tennis shoes, as frosty-haired elders and a dizzying array of parents and activists in their formal best lined themselves in rows. Milk crates passed through the crowd with the unbroken rhythm of veteran delivery workers. Crates of petitions. Papers, please, for sure: 18,300 hard-won signatures in bins that dotted the floor with black-on-yellow placards:
RECALL PEARCE—CITIZENS FOR A BETTER ARIZONA
Demanding the recall of the State Senate president, the bold architect of SB 1070, the Citizens for a Better Arizona effort marked the culmination of a campaign that had defied expectations, and signaled a watershed moment for the beleaguered state—and the nation.
Once the state and Maricopa County recorders verified the legal requirement of at least 7,756 signatures from the traditionally conservative and Mormonfounded Mesa district, Pearce would become the first State Senate president in American history to be recalled. A new election would be scheduled for the fall of 2011. The Tea Party’s grip on the Republican Party and its most important staging ground in the nation would either be solidified—or broken.
The rows parted on cue, as Citizens for a Better Arizona cofounder Randy Parraz swept to the front in his hurried manner. Dark-rimmed glasses and a dark stylish suit framed his ramrod posture and intense gestures; as always, he was flanked by his equally svelte Citizens cofounder, Chad Snow. Parraz looked around the packed room as more people squeezed inside and everyone attempted to widen the walls. Retired librarian Mary Lou Boettcher pursed her lips in a serious view of the scene as she stood near Brenda Rascon, the doctoral biology student and daughter of Mexican immigrants, who could barely contain her enthusiasm. Progressive Democrats of America activist Dan O’Neal, a gray-haired retired history teacher, tugged at his tie.
Coming only days after a Supreme Court decision had upheld the first in a series of controversial immigration laws originating in Arizona—in this case, the imposition of penalties on employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers—the recall campaign had national implications. As the national Tea Party hero, the de facto governor of Arizona, and the motivating force behind the state’s notorious blitz of extremist policies on border security, education, health, guns, the environment, and immigration, Pearce had influenced legislators and government officials in other states and had done more than any other Tea Party politician in the nation to peddle a nativist and antifederal political brand shaped by the powerful American Legislative Exchange Council, among other corporate lobby interests.
The tide was turning in Arizona. Working door-to-door in the desert heat over the past four months, against the backdrop of the state’s floundering image and economy, Parraz and Snow and their volunteer shock troops intended to make Pearce’s policies a national referendum on immigration and civil rights.
“We want to send a message to Senator Pearce, to every legislator down here at the Arizona legislature,” Snow told the media, “that this kind of extreme, ideologically driven policies will no longer be tolerated in our state.”
“Extremist politics only result in short-term gain,” added Parraz, who called Pearce an “outright embarrassment to the state.” The recall effort stood as a warning for right-wing extremists across the country that there would be “consequences” for their policies and rhetoric. Throughout the campaign, Arizona activists stressed that the recall effort transcended the hot-button immigration issue, reminding residents that all of Pearce’s draconian measures were out of touch with the values and interests of Arizonans. In an official statement, Citizens for a Better Arizona focused on Pearce’s “reckless disregard” for public education; his support for drastic cuts in health care for the poor, including the state’s widely denounced termination of the organ transplant program; and his role in diminishing the state’s reputation and economy.
Calling Pearce a “real demagogue,” retired educator John McDonald, who lived in the state senator’s district and had joined the door-to-door campaign over the past 120 days, said Pearce’s “meanness goes too far.” He criticized Pearce for what he called punishing measures against immigrants, the poor and indigent, as well as schools and children. An active Mormon, Snow charged that Pearce was even out of step with the majority of Peace’s fellow Mormons in the district and around the nation.
Trying to stave off a meltdown, the Tea Party president’s defenders had brought him even more embarrassment in the days leading up to the recall. Former US Representative J. D. Hayworth had just sent out a nearly incomprehensible email to Pearce supporters, calling the Citizens for a Better Arizona campaigners a group of “socialist thugs who carry swastikas.”
“Arizona has been in the headlines for all of the wrong reasons,” Parraz told the crowd in the lobby. “We need a victory now. If we come together, we can hold Pearce accountable and win.” The children went first, a fistful of signed petitions in their hands. They tiptoed their way to the counter and dropped the petitions into a pile, and then a seemingly endless line of participants followed with the same expressions of astonishment. Everyone watched, the cameras flashed, and Parraz looked on with his intense expression as the stack of petitions grew high enough to block the view of the state employees.
Now the real campaign would begin. The secretary of state and Maricopa County Recorder’s Office had to verify the petition signatures over the next ninety days, at which point Governor Brewer would issue an announcement for a recall election in the fall of 2011.
“If you can recall Pearce,” Parraz shouted to the crowd, and to the viewers on national television, “you can recall anybody.”
A feeling of victory already hovered over the Capitol in Phoenix that day, as the crowd scattered into the lobby and flooded the grounds. Within minutes, photos and updates and schedules for the next recall events exploded on Facebook and across the blogosphere. Having lit a fire under a new movement in Arizona—one that was likely to grow and become more powerful—Parraz and the Citizens for a Better Arizona knew they stood to be the most organized and inspiring political force in the state.
Within five weeks, the Citizens movement received a swift affirmation of its new power. Secretary of State Ken Bennett notified Governor Brewer on July 8 that Pearce had officially been recalled. Bennett confirmed that the petitions “exceeded the minimum signatures required by the Arizona Constitution.”
According to Bennett’s statement, Pearce had two options: resign from office within five business days, or become a candidate in the recall election. Either way, Pearce became the first State Senate president in recent memory to be recalled.
“No one expected this or picked up on this political earthquake,” said an excited Parraz, fully aware of how his grassroots-led campaign had electrified a bipartisan effort in Pearce’s district. Parraz credited Pearce’s extremist leadership with prompting a “dramatic shift” over the past six months.
“We had people pouring into the office,” Parraz said, citing the role of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents in the canvassing initiative, “and they told us: Russell Pearce is too extreme for our district and state.”
The recall campaign had racked up a record number of signatures from discontented Arizonans. The secretary of state’s office confirmed that an additional one-third of the necessary signatures had been properly collected and verified.
Within fifteen days, Governor Brewer had to set the date for the recall election. When the Arizona Supreme Court gave the final green light for the November 8 election date, one thing became clear: Citizens for a Better Arizona had galvanized a new era in Arizona politics.
Soon the historic recall of Pearce exploded into a spectacular display of high-road and low-road politics. Moderate Republican accountant, educator, and Mormon leader Jerry Lewis from Mesa emerged to claim the frontrunner’s position, and the Tea Party president started to look desperate. While a bipartisan community effort for Lewis spread quickly across Mesa, emphasizing a positive campaign for jobs, education, and a “balanced approach to immigration,” Pearce and his Tea Party supporters openly flaunted a series of dirty tricks, all of which backfired.
Thanks to the legwork of Phoenix New Times reporter Stephen Lemons, legendary Phoenix videographer Dennis Gilman, and a legion of Pearce watchers, virtually every attempt by Tea Party activists and Pearce supporters to intimidate, mislead, litigate, and even plant a bogus Mexican American candidate to confuse voters and derail competing votes was exposed.
The dirty tricks had started even before Lewis entered the race. A day before his announcement, while he was out jogging in his Mesa neighborhood, the fifty-four-year-old former Boy Scout leader was struck in the groin with a padlock thrown from a passing pickup truck. (The Pearce campaign denied any knowledge of the attack.) Within days, Lewis saw other signs of trouble on his jogs. Mysterious campaign signs invoking Cesar Chavez’s “Sí se puede!” slogan started appearing around the district in support of Olivia Cortes, a phantom Latino candidate who had never appeared in public.
As Pearce replaced three members on the state’s Ethics Committee over an investigation of a colleague’s domestic abuse charges, his campaign spiraled deeper into allegations of fraud and ethics violations. Compounding this, a series of blatantly fraudulent efforts by his supporters to set up Cortes’s sham candidacy to undermine his main opponent’s support among Latino voters unraveled into a damaging comedy of errors.
Along with the Cesar Chavez signs, a new campaign website for Cortes emerged that invoked Superman’s pursuit of “Truth, Justice and the American Way.” But in a strange act of either plagiarism or mockery, an accompanying statement emailed by Cortes and widely circulated by Pearce supporters and websites borrowed text from Randy Parraz and the Recall Pearce campaign Facebook site.
Unraveling the Pearce campaign’s bungles, Lemons and Gilman methodically connected Pearce operators to most of Cortes’s campaign endeavors. In apparent violation of the Arizona Code of Judicial Conduct, Pearce’s brother Lester Pearce, a justice of the peace, had assisted in his brother’s campaign hijinks. So had his daughters, who had collected petitions for Cortes. Franklin Bruce Ross, the plaintiff on behalf of Pearce in the failed lawsuit to challenge the recall petitions, also solicited petitions for Cortes. And East Valley Tea Party chair Greg Western turned them in to the secretary of state’s office.
Once Citizens recall campaign organizer Mary Lou Boettcher and her attorney Tom Ryan filed suit in the Superior Court of Maricopa County for a “verified statement of election contest,” the party for the fake candidate was over. Cortes was, in fact, a real person. A retired and bewildered, if not amused, Mexican immigrant in Mesa who had joined the Tea Party cause, she emerged at the hearing and quickly withdrew from the race. The Pearce team had been shamed.
With less than six weeks to go until the November 8 election, it was hard to imagine how much lower Pearce’s campaign could sink.
In a sign of things to come, right-wing Arizona Representative Trent Franks sent out a fundraising letter, which breathlessly (and erroneously) declared that “liberal groups from all over the country,” along with “left-wing open-border activists,” are “expected to spend more than one million dollars” to smear “the hard work and good reputation of our friend Russell Pearce.” Calling on all patriots to prevent Pearce from becoming “the first State Senate President in American history to be recalled,” Franks threw down the gauntlet: “They will do anything to defeat the author of SB 1070.”
Only days before the recall election, Minnesota representative and presidential contender Michele Bachmann brought her floundering campaign to Arizona, giving a special shout-out to the embattled Pearce for his role as the architect of SB 1070. But Bachmann’s dismal ranking behind Republican frontrunners Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry only served to remind Arizonans that Pearce’s ship was set to sink on November 8.
In one of the biggest campaign flops in recent memory, an estimated four hundred true believers barely covered the first rows in the thirteen-thousand-seat Hohokam baseball stadium for a Pearce rally in Mesa on October 14, 2011, a Friday night. The self-proclaimed “Tea Party president” had heavily advertised and touted the event as the mother of all political rallies in Arizona, featuring a who’s-who lineup of extremist right-wing lawmakers—including perennial candidate and former American Constitution Party leader Tom Tancredo, who declared “the American way of life” was at stake. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio swaggered to the stage and addressed the largely empty stadium with his usual aplomb. State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal, now leading the charge on the crackdown of Mexican American Studies in Tucson, praised Pearce for his commitment to education.
Although Pearce had defiantly declared at a recent debate with Jerry Lewis that his extremist policies had placed Arizona “at the front of the parade,” that parade had gone elsewhere, apparently. Pearce had outspent Lewis three to one, but his grassroots support appeared to be unraveling.
“I felt as though I was surrounded by political has-beens, by people who had been damaged by their own destructive brand of politics,” said Citizens volunteer Brenda Rascon. “There was a feeling of sadness in the air accompanied by halfhearted speeches that bordered on pathetic and didn’t seem to give State Senate President Pearce the encouragement and peace he may have been seeking.”
Almost a year to the day after he took power and thrust Arizona’s hard-line immigration and antifederal laws into the national arena, State Senate President Russell Pearce watched in bewilderment on November 8, 2011, as an extraordinary citizens campaign dethroned him.
“Today marks the beginning of a new era in Arizona politics,” declared Parraz. “The reign of Senate President Russell Pearce has finally come to an end.”
As the darling of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council and an influential ideologue in the nativist-tinged anti-immigrant movement, however, Pearce was not the only loser in the election upset. With more than 90 percent of his campaign funds coming from corporate lobbyists and out-of-district contributions, allowing him to vastly outspend his opponent, Pearce lost by a nearly 10 percent margin—53.4 percent to 45.3 percent—to Jerry Lewis, a moderate Mormon leader and Republican newcomer who largely ran his grassroots campaign as a referendum on Pearce’s extremist views.
Pearce’s downfall stood as a looming cautionary tale for the 2012 presidential election and placed the hotly charged issue of immigration policy back onto the front burner. While the state’s controversial SB 1070 immigration law had been embraced by all Republican presidential candidates, and replicated in battleground states like Georgia, the question remained whether Democrats would join Parraz and his new bipartisan campaign approach or stay in the shadows on immigration reform like Arizona’s reticent and failed Democrats in 2010.
Endorsing Romney for the Republican nomination for president, a defeated but defiant Pearce told the Washington Post five months after his recall loss: “Attrition by enforcement. It’s identical to mine—enforce the laws. We have good laws, just enforce them.”
“[Democrats] thought they were going to take over the Senate and the House two years ago,” Pearce added. “We got the largest majority ever in the history of the state of Arizona in the Senate and the House. And you know what brought it there? SB 1070. Everybody ran on SB 1070. We won districts that Republicans have never won before. So, it’s nice to have hope and dreams, you know, but it ain’t gonna happen.”
“This is a huge shift for the Republicans as much as the Democrats,” Parraz said, standing in front of the Citizens office in Mesa. “But it will only have a sustainable impact if we continue to get out and do the work, and not sit back and wait for the change.”
With an estimated five hundred campaign volunteers taking part in door-to-door canvassing efforts, and a full-scale get-out-the-vote operation, the Citizens group signed up 1,150 new voters—a number that appeared at first to be insignificant but ultimately proved pivotal, considering that Pearce represented one of the most conservative districts in the nation—and amassed a dedicated online following that could mobilize within a minute’s call.
“Immigration issues are not Republican or Democratic,” said Parraz, who went to great lengths to stress that the recall transcended a single issue, showcasing Pearce’s leadership role in a states’ rights agenda that cut education and health care, and oversaw the state’s economic decline. “We have to work together to make effective change.”
“Russell Pearce is too extreme, but he is not alone,” said Parraz, who often chastised state and national leaders for allowing the Tea Party figurehead and other hard-liners like Arpaio to go unchallenged. ”This election shows that such extremist behavior will not be rewarded, and will be held accountable.”
Galvanizing a huge turnout of bipartisan voters, including the growing numbers of retiring baby boomers, Latino youth, and immigrant communities, Parraz and his Citizens group had taught Arizona a compelling lesson on how to stand up for truth and justice.
“This election sends a message to other Democratic efforts,” announced Dan O’Neal, a key volunteer on the recall campaign and activist with the Arizona chapter of the Progressive Democrats of America, “to not be afraid to take on issues and races in red states.”
The clarion call had been made for the 2012 election—and far into Arizona’s future.