Although the local economy is far more diversified today, nearly half the jobs in Colorado Springs still depend upon military spending. During the 1990s, while major bases were being shut down across the country, new facilities kept opening in Colorado Springs. Much of the Star Wars antimissile defense system is being designed and tested at Schriever Air Force Base, a dozen miles east of the city. And Peterson Air Force Base now houses one of America’s newest and most high-tech units — the Space Command. It launches, operates, and defends America’s military satellites. It tests, maintains, and upgrades the nation’s ballistic missiles. And it guides research on exotic space-based weaponry to attack enemy satellites, aircraft, and even targets on the ground. Officers at the Space Command believe that before long the United States will fight its first war in space. Should that day ever come, Colorado Springs will be at the center of the action. The motto of a local air force unit promises a new kind of American firepower: “In Your Face from Outer Space.”
The presence of these high-tech military installations attracted defense contractors to Colorado Springs, mainly from California. Kaman Services arrived in 1957. Hewlett Packard followed in 1962. TRW, a southern California firm, opened its first Colorado Springs branch in 1968. Litton Data Systems moved one of its divisions from Van Nuys, California, to Colorado Springs in 1976. Not long afterward Ford Aerospace sold ten acres of land in Orange County and used the money to buy three hundred acres in Colorado Springs. Today a long list of defense contractors does business in the city. The advanced communications networks installed to serve those companies and the military have drawn computer chip manufacturers, telemarketers, and software companies to Colorado Springs. The quality of life is a big selling point, along with the well-educated workforce and the local attitudes toward labor. A publication distributed by the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce notes that in the city’s private industry, the rate of union membership stands at 0.0 percent. Colorado Springs now views itself as a place on the cutting edge, the high-tech capital of the Rockies. Business leaders promote the town with nicknames like “Silicon Mountain,” “Space Mountain,” and “The Space Capital of the Free World.”
The new businesses and residents from southern California brought a new set of attitudes. In 1946, R. C. Hoiles, the owner of the Orange County Register and later the founder of the Freedom Newspaper chain, purchased the largest daily newspaper in Colorado Springs, the Gazette-Telegraph. Hoiles was politically conservative, a champion of competition and free enterprise; his editorials had attacked Herbert Hoover for being too left-wing. In the 1980s the Freedom Newspaper chain purchased the Gazette’s only rival in town, the Colorado Springs Sun, a struggling paper with a more liberal outlook. After buying the Sun, Freedom Newspapers fired all its employees and shut it down. In 1990, James Dobson decided to move Focus on the Family, a religious organization, from the Los Angeles suburb of Pomona to Colorado Springs. Dobson is a child psychologist and radio personality as well as the author of a best-selling guide for parents, Dare to Discipline (1970). He blames weak parents for the excesses of the sixties youth counterculture, advocates spanking disobedient children with a “neutral object,” and says that parents must convey to preschoolers two fundamental messages: “(1) I love you, little one, more than you can possibly understand… (2) Because I love you so much, I must teach you to obey me.” Although less well known than Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, Dobson’s Focus on the Family generates much larger annual revenues.
The arrival of Focus on the Family helped turn Colorado Springs into a magnet for evangelical Christian groups. The city had always been more conservative than Denver, but that conservatism was usually expressed in the sort of live-and-let-live attitude common in the American West. During the early 1990s, religious groups in Colorado Springs became outspoken opponents of feminism, homosexuality, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. The city became the headquarters for roughly sixty religious organizations, some of them large, some of them painfully obscure. Members and supporters of the International Bible Society, the Christian Booksellers Association, the World Radio Missionary Fellowship, Young Life, the Fellowship of Christian Cowboys, and World Christian Incorporated, among others, settled in Colorado Springs.
Today there is not a single elected official in Colorado Springs — or in El Paso County, the surrounding jurisdiction — who’s a registered Democrat. Indeed, the Democratic Party did not even run a candidate for Congress there in 2000. The political changes that have lately swept through the city have also taken place, in a less extreme form, throughout the Rocky Mountain West. A generation ago, the region was one of the most liberal in the country. In 1972, all of the governors in the eight mountain states — Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, even Idaho and Utah — were Democrats. By 1998, all of the governors in these states were Republicans, as were three-quarters of the U.S. senators. The region is now more staunchly Republican than the American South.
As in Colorado Springs, the huge influx of white, middle-class voters from southern California has played a decisive role in the Rocky Mountain West’s shift to the right. During the early 1990s, for the first time in California history, more people moved out of the state than into it. Between 1990 and 1995, approximately one million people left southern California, many of them heading to the mountain states. William H. Frey, a former professor of demography at the University of Michigan, has called this migration “the new white flight.” In 1998, the white population of California fell below 50 percent for the first time since the Gold Rush. The exodus of whites has changed California’s political equation as well, turning the birthplace of the Reagan Revolution into one of the nation’s most solidly Democratic states.
Many of the problems that caused white, middle-class families to leave southern California are now appearing in the Rocky Mountain states. During the early 1990s, about 100,000 people moved to Colorado every year. But spending on government services did not increase at a corresponding rate — because Colorado voters enacted a Taxpayers Bill of Rights in 1992 that placed strict limits on new government spending. The initiative was modeled after California’s Proposition 13 and championed by Douglas Bruce, a Colorado Springs landlord who’d recently arrived from Los Angeles. By the late 1990s, Colorado’s spending on education ranked forty-ninth in the nation; fire departments throughout the state were understaffed; and parts of Interstate 25 in Colorado Springs were clogged with three times the number of cars that the highway was designed to hold. Meanwhile, the state government had an annual surplus of about $700 million that by law could not be used to solve any of these problems. The development along Colorado’s Front Range is not yet as all-encompassing as the sprawl of Los Angeles — where one-third of the surface area is now covered by freeways, roads, and parking lots — but someday it may be.