Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/39

 Chapter Two member of a prominent Albuquerque family that operated a large Chevrolet dealership, "that for every thousand dollars that New Mexico receives, she pays back to the [U. S.] Treasury through the Internal Revenue Service only about $1.00." Galles took pride in New Mexico's cleverness, claiming that "we profit by federal aid," with "the burden of taxes … laid upon the wealth of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California."

This apparent inconsistency (conservative officials seeking federal investment when the free market failed) followed a pattern evident in New Mexico and the West throughout the twentieth century. Once private investors entered a region like the Tularosa basin, they quickly ascertained the prospects for future gains. Indicators such as population growth and income levels dictated investment decisions; hence the preference for capitalization of projects in the Rio Grande valley from El Paso to Santa Fe. By 1910 Alamogordo's population had stabilized at some 3,000 residents, a number that would change only imperceptibly over the next twenty years (3,224 by 1930). This modest advance (seven percent) stood in contrast to New Mexico's overall increase of twenty four percent for the years 1910–1930. The state's economy also did not perform well in these years, with forty percent of all chartered banks failing between 1920–1924. Personal income stagnated in the bottom ten percent of states (even before the Depression), and by 1933 New Mexicans earned on average only fifty-four percent of their fellow citizens nationwide.

An educated, articulate mid westerner like Tom Charles knew that economic survival in the Tularosa basin required flexibility in matters of economics. Rather than hewing to the public version of Calvin Coolidge's conservatism (tax cuts, budget reductions, and veneration of the free market), the insurance agent and his chamber of commerce realized that federal funds remained New Mexico's best guarantor of financial health. Dietmar Schneider-Hector characterized Charles' efforts in the 1920s to create White Sands National Monument as "Arcadian Boosterism," a reference to local novelist Eugene Manlove Rhodes' Bransford of Rainbow Range (1920). In this work Rhodes called Alamogordo "Arcadia," and claimed that among its major assets were "the railroad, two large modern sawmills, the climate and printer's ink." While witty and colorful, such descriptors disguise the sense of urgency felt by promoters of growth everywhere in the West, especially when the nation's fiscal health declined as precipitously as it did in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Tom Charles devoted a good portion of his time in the decade of the Twenties to alerting state and national leaders of the impending collapse of the Otero County economy. In 1923 he wrote to John Morrow, congressman from New Mexico, complaining of the unfairness of public land ownership in the county. Only five percent of the land (269,337 acres) belonged to private taxpayers, and only six percent of that