Copper, The State That Built America

Arizona's state nickname is the Copper State. That is not sentiment. It is economic fact.

Copper was discovered in commercial quantities in southern Arizona in the eighteen seventies, and by the early twentieth century Arizona was producing more copper than any other state in the country. The mines at Bisbee, Jerome, Globe, Clifton-Morenci, and Ajo employed tens of thousands of workers and built fortunes that funded railroads, banks, and political careers. Phelps Dodge and Anaconda Copper ran operations so large they constituted company towns, places where the corporation owned the houses, the stores, the hospital, and in many cases, the local government.

The Morenci mine, in eastern Arizona, is the largest copper mine in the United States by output. It is still operating. During World War Two, Arizona copper went into the electrical wiring of tanks, ships, aircraft, and field communications systems. The War Production Board called Arizona copper essential to the Allied war effort.

Arizona produces roughly seventy percent of U.S. copper output today, about eight hundred thousand tons per year. The metal goes into electrical wiring for houses and cars, into plumbing, into the motors of electric vehicles. As the United States builds out renewable energy infrastructure, demand for copper is rising sharply. The same mountains that Geronimo's band hid in, the same ridgelines that Spanish missionaries looked at and noted as mineral-bearing, those mountains are still being mined.

Copper shaped the labor movement in Arizona too. The nineteen seventeen Bisbee Deportation, in which mine owners organized a vigilante roundup and shipped twelve hundred striking workers out of the state in cattle cars, is one of the most dramatic episodes of anti-union violence in American history.