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Description
Civic leadership in Phoenix, Arizona promoted the city's performing arts as part of a deliberate plan towards the larger growth agenda after World War II. From the 1940s through the late 1960s, the business and professional leaders who controlled city government served on boards for performing arts groups, built venues, offered financial support, and sometimes participated as artists in order to attract high-technology firms and highly skilled workers to the area. They believed one aspect of Phoenix's urban development included a need for quality, high-culture performing arts scene that signaled a high quality of life and drew more residents. After this era of boosterism ended and control shifted from business and professional leaders to city government, performing arts support fluctuated with leadership's attitudes and the local, state, and national economies. The early civic leaders were successful in their overall mission to expand the city - now the sixth largest in the nation - and many of the organizations and venues they patronized still serve the community; however, the commitment to developing a quality arts and culture scene waned. Today's public, private, and arts and culture leaders are using the same argument as Phoenix tries once again to become a high-technology center. The theory that arts and culture stimulate the economy directly and indirectly is true today as it was in the 1940s. Although the plan was effective, it needed fully committed supporters, strong infrastructure, and continued revising in order to move the vision into the twenty-first century.
ContributorsBickert, Michelle (Author) / Vandermeer, Phiip (Thesis advisor) / Dallett, Nancy (Committee member) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis examines the immediate post-World War II operational strategy of Valley National Bank of Arizona, a Phoenix-based institution in operation from 1899 until its 1992 acquisition by Ohio-based Banc One Corporation (now JPMorgan Chase). For the purposes of this study, the immediate post-war period is defined as 1944 to January 20, 1953, a span that opens with the bank's wartime planning efforts for the post-war period and ends with the 1953 retirement of bank president Walter Bimson. By the end of World War II, Valley National ranked as the largest financial institution in the eight-state Rocky Mountain region, as measured by total deposits. However, post-war regulatory issues, competitor expansion, and an inability to generate deposit volume sufficient to meet subject period loan demands challenged bank leaders seeking to maintain market share and grow company profitability and stock value. In response to these difficulties, the bank focused on a three-pronged operational strategy emphasizing advertising, market-appropriate deposit and loan product offerings, and an aggressive branching and acquisition campaign. This strategy did not result in unmitigated success as the bank did experience a decrease in average deposit account balances, lost mortgage market share, and undertook acquisition activity that later resulted in federal antitrust action. However, by the end of the subject period, the three-pronged strategy employed by the bank did result in an increase in deposit dollar market share, as measured by deposits controlled directly and indirectly by the institution, rising annual net profits, and substantial share price appreciation. The findings related to bank strategy and results presented in this thesis are based primarily upon information found in the 169-box Valley National Bank Collection housed at the Arizona Historical Society. Extensive newspaper research conducted using targeted date range and keyword searches and careful consideration of secondary source materials relating to the bank, the banking industry, and state, regional, and national politics, economics, and culture during the subject period provided additional information used in this study, and corroborated much of the material found in the Valley National Bank Collection files.
ContributorsSouthard, John (Author) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Thesis advisor) / Vandermeer, Philip (Committee member) / Gammage, Jr., Grady (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Historians often characterize first ladies in the Progressive Era as representatives of the last vestiges of Victorian womanhood in an increasingly modern society. This dissertation argues that first ladies negotiated an image of themselves that fulfilled both traditional and modern notions of womanhood. In crafting these images, first ladies constructed images of their celebrity selves that were uniquely modern. Thus, images of first ladies in the Progressive Era show them as modest and feminine but also autonomous, intelligent, and capable. Using the historian Charles Ponce de Leon's research on modern human-interest journalism, I contend that first ladies in the Progressive Era worked with the modern press in a symbiotic relationship. This relationship allowed the press exclusive access to what was, ostensibly, the first lady's private, and therefore authentic, self. By purporting to reveal parts of their private lives in the press, first ladies showed themselves as down-to-earth despite their success and fulfilled by their domestic pursuits despite their compelling public lives. By offering the press exclusive access to their lives, first ladies secured the opportunity to shape specific images of themselves to appeal, as broadly as possible, to their husbands and parties' constituents and the American public. First ladies in the Progressive Era thus acted as political figures by using both public and private, or what historian Catherine Allgor terms, "unofficial spaces" to support and reflect their husbands and parties' political agendas. In examining representations of first ladies in popular magazines and newspapers from 1901 to 1921 in tandem with letters, memoirs, and other personal papers from these women, a clear pattern emerges. Despite personal differences, first ladies in the Progressive Era represented themselves according to a specific formula in the modern press. The images, constructed by first ladies in this time period, reflect shifts in economic, social, and political life in Progressive Era America, which called for women to be independent and intelligent yet still maintain their femininity and domesticity.
ContributorsHorohoe, Jill (Author) / Gullett, Gayle (Thesis advisor) / Longley, Rodney K (Committee member) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011