Arizona Statehood, Last and Almost Vetoed

On February fourteenth, nineteen twelve, Valentine's Day, Arizona became the forty-eighth state, the last of the contiguous forty-eight to enter the union. It had waited a long time.

Arizona Territory had been organized in eighteen sixty-three, carved out of the western part of New Mexico Territory. For nearly fifty years, it petitioned for statehood and was repeatedly denied. Congress worried about the territory's sparse population, its political instability, the ongoing Apache conflicts, and the outsized influence of the copper mining companies.

The final obstacle came not from Arizona but from Washington. President William Howard Taft, a former federal judge, objected strenuously to a provision in the proposed Arizona constitution that allowed voters to recall judges from the bench. Taft considered this an attack on judicial independence. He vetoed the statehood bill.

Arizona's leaders did what was necessary. They removed the recall provision from the constitution, just long enough to get Taft's signature. The moment Arizona achieved statehood, the provision was restored.

Taft reportedly was not pleased.

The state that finally entered the union in nineteen twelve was built on Indigenous displacement, Mexican heritage, extractive industry, and an arid landscape that the rest of the country did not yet fully understand. It was the last of the contiguous states because it was genuinely hard country to govern, hard to farm, hard to supply with water, and hard to convince Eastern politicians to take seriously.

It has spent the century since proving them wrong, and in some cases, proving them right in ways no one anticipated.