Read an Excerpt From the Prologue to Golden State

I found an apartment in a hip section of Long Beach, near the water, and turned in my aging, corroded car for a new coupe (the salesman, helping me transfer my belongings from my Ford Galaxie and discovering a bent and battered snow shovel in the trunk, showed it around the lot like a paleontological relic).

In an experience that millions before me had shared, however, my conception of California as a paradise on Earth did not survive its first encounter with reality. In late August, during my first weekend in town, I walked what appeared to be three blocks to the water, laden with a lawn chair and beach towel, only to discover that what looks on a map like an easy stroll can turn into a miles-long slog on foot. I expected to be dipping my toes into the clear waters of the Pacific, but the beach fronted on a murky bay fed by the Los Angeles River, a once-bucolic stream now confined in a concrete channel and carrying the fetid runoff of thousands of square miles of paved-over terrain. The rainbow sheen of petroleum on the water’s surface signaled that the vast ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles stood just beyond the breakwater. The mysterious islets just offshore bearing parti-colored towers surrounded by palms could be mistaken from a distance for amusement parks; in fact they were oil platforms, their gaudy facades concealing derricks and pumps operating twenty-four hours a day.

I had been misled into thinking of California as a place of unalloyed cosmopolitanism. Instead, I landed in a community built by midwestern transplants that had acquired the nickname “Iowa by the Sea.” Neighboring Orange County, where I was assigned as a business reporter, was a hotbed of far-right red politics nestled within California’s coastal strip of blue.

A few weeks after my arrival, a press release crossed my desk from John G. Schmitz, a former Orange County congressman now holding a State Senate seat. Schmitz once had been drummed out of the John Birch Society for being too conservative. “State Sen. John G. Schmitz survives the attack of the bull dykes,” the document read, recounting how at a series of public hearings around the state for an anti-abortion bill he was sponsoring he had been confronted by “a sea of hard, Jewish and (arguably) female faces.” A few months later, Schmitz, who had run for office on a family-values platform, was swept up in a scandal involving a mistress charged with child endangerment for her treatment of the infant they had had together. He lost the next election and never ran for office again.

Plainly, there was more to California than the bright, liberal image. That was always true. It still is.

Getting a grip on this vast, diverse state is challenging, but necessary. California is often depicted as a place almost alien to the rest of the country. According to a widely repeated line sometimes attributed (probably erroneously) to Mark Twain, “America is built on a tilt and everything loose slides to California.” Yet as of this writing, California is home to more than one in eight Americans. In a very real sense, it is America. To understand California is to understand America; to understand America, one must understand California.

The reform-minded economist Henry George articulated it this concept as long ago as 1880,  explaining for his readers an outburst of anti-Chinese sentiment in San Francisco.

It is yet a mistake to regard California as a community widely differing from more Eastern States (George wrote). I am, in fact, inclined rather to look upon California as a typical American State, and San Francisco as a typical American city. It would be difficult to name any State that in resources, climate, and industries comes nearer to representing the whole Union.

 

Yet there is something exceptional about California that has commanded the attention of America and the world throughout the six centuries since European explorers first heard rumors of its riches and decided to see for themselves. California was the destination of all three of the great human migrations of American history: the Gold Rush of 1848-49; the inflow to Southern California at the turn of the last century that transformed an unprepossessing, arid basin into the teeming Los Angeles metropolis; and the flight from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. The first was driven by speculation, the second by ballyhoo, and the third by destitution, but the migrants all were motivated by the common goal of starting over. “They who came to California,” wrote Joan Didion, a child of Sacramento quoting her own eighth-grade graduation speech, “were not the self-satisfied, happy and content people, but the adventurous, the restless, and the daring.” Not all found what they were looking for, quite obviously. The doubts and worries that afflicted those who came west for a new life only to have their hopes dashed can be seen in the careworn expression in the eyes of Florence Owens Thompson, the “Migrant Mother” of Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph, taken at a failed farm camp on the Nipomo Mesa scarcely ten miles from the Pacific Ocean, the very end of the road.

Still, the magnetism of the place for anyone in search of new lives and loves has never faded. In our own times it can be detected in popular songs and poems. Tony Bennett’s lover calls to him to reclaim his heart in San Francisco, Joni Mitchell sings of leaving the cold and settled ways of Paris to come home to California. The Mamas and the Papas dreamed of escaping gray skies and brown leaves to be safe and warm in L.A., the Beach Boys wished they could transform all the girls they meet into California girls.

From lyrics and verses, one might think the draw is chiefly the sun: For Neil Young the California sunset offered “all the colors in the sky.” The poet Vachel Lindsay counted “ten gold suns in California/When all other lands have one.” Lindsay also wrote, however, of seeking California’s “spiritual gold.” And truly, California is one of the few places on Earth that can be thought of both as a geographical location and a state of mind. It is the latter aspect that has beckoned multitudes. Many come not to partake of its natural riches, though these are plentiful, but to carry forward their personal quests for a fresh environment mentally, intellectually, spiritually.

Taking California’s measure may not be as straightforward a task as it sounds, for California has consistently been the most misunderstood state in the union.

“There has always been something about it that has incited hyperbole, that has made for exaggeration,” wrote Carey McWilliams, among the foremost chroniclers of California’s historical pageant. (He titled his 1949 one-volume history California: The Great Exception, though he was not entirely clear about what it was an exception to.) McWilliams might better have labeled California “the great contradiction,” for its path to global influence and power has been paved with boom-and-bust economics, social frictions, and leadership in progressive and reactionary politics alike.

McWilliams divided those who had written about California into two categories: “the skeptics who, in retrospect, have been made to look ludicrously gullible; and the liars and boasters who have been confounded by the fulfillment of their dizziest predictions.” Up to the present day, reportage about California has fallen neatly into those categories—either proclaiming a new stage in the “California Dream,” or anticipating the dream’s ultimate demise.

The tug of war between California’s enthusiasts and detractors is older than its statehood, which happened in 1850. The Gold Rush of 1849 instilled in a vast migratory swarm of “Argonauts,” as the newcomers were known, visions of fortunes to be made in the valleys and riverbeds of California. With them came the doubters. One was an adventurer from North Carolina named Hinton R. Helper, who arrived in the teeth of the Gold Rush with a skeptical chip on his shoulder and promptly condemned for his friends at home the state’s “rottenness and its corruption, its squalor and its misery, its crime and its shame, its gold and its dross.” He was not wrong, exactly, merely hyperbolic.

To Henry David Thoreau there was something disreputable in the grasping for wealth that defined the allure of the distant state. “The rush to California…, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind….The hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company.”

Mark Twain soaked up the spirit of the land during a sojourn in the 1860s while the vestiges of the Gold Rush were still at hand. He was appalled at the condition in which the prospectors left the landscape, writing in Roughing It (1872) of “its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers” and lamenting the sight of what were once “streets crowded and rife with business” reduced after the exhaustion of the gold mines to “nothing…but a lifeless, homeless solitude.”

While it lasted, however, the era had brought to California “a splendid population” of “stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves,” Twain wrote. “It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day—and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says, ‘Well, that is California all over.’”

Californians have always shown the determination to create their own destinies. Much of the loose material in Twain’s putative quip became transformed in California’s environment into something greater--and often something transformative for the outside world.

Unwilling to wait for Congress to decide whether to admit the territory as a free or slave state, California’s white settlers took matters into their own hands by writing their own state constitution in 1849, a year before admission to the union. On their own initiative they allowed “neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude.” At the turn of the last century, California stood in the vanguard of progressive politics as personified by Hiram Johnson, who during his governorship (1911-1917) established its tradition of ballot-box legislating through initiatives, referendums, and recalls. His goal was the restoration of the public’s political power, which had been ceded to corporate interests. In the 1930s the state became a hotbed of utopian social and political thought. The socialist writer Upton Sinclair ran for governor in 1933 on a platform he labeled EPIC, for “End Poverty in California”; he might have won, if not for a conservative smear campaign featuring, among other fakery, repurposed Hollywood film clips purportedly showing hordes of hobos and tramps flowing over the border to take advantage of Sinclair’s handouts. Around the same time a Long Beach physician named Francis Everett Townsend proposed a plan to end poverty among seniors by paying a pension of $200 a month to every American 60 and older. The Townsend plan did not pencil out economically, but it did help to ensure the enactment of Social Security in 1935. By then an evangelist preacher named Aimee Semple McPherson—guided west by divine instruction, so she said--had established a temple from which she proclaimed a heaven on Earth, pioneering the use of the new technology of radio to send her message around the world and to garner for her international fame.

Today, in the first decades of the 21^st century, California’s prodigious influence in national and global economics and politics is firmly established. Its gross domestic product is estimated to be more than $3.5 trillion; if it were a country it would rank fifth globally, behind the U.S., China, Japan, and Germany and ahead of India, Britain, France and Italy. Following the 2020 Census, California was fated to lose a Congressional seat, an unprecedented development in the modern era; but its delegation of 52 Representatives was still almost half again as large as that of the runner-up, Texas, with 38.

The state’s size and wealth has produced what economists term the “California effect.” The phrase was coined in 1995 by political scientist David Vogel of the University of California to describe how the state’s size, influence and position “on the cutting edge of environmental regulation…helped drive many American environmental regulations upward,” drawing other states to follow its lead in creating standards for automobile and industrial emissions like a giant planet gathering moons to its orbit by the sheer force of gravity. The phrase soon came to signify the state’s ability to project more than merely its environmental values to the nation at large. The California effect placed the state in the forefront of movements such as women’s suffrage, religious evangelism, citizen legislating, progressivism, conservatism, environmentalism and conservationism. The flow of political, economic, and social values did not take place on a one-way street. Many of the ideas, forces, innovations, and inventions that have transformed life in America originated in California, but even those born elsewhere were often put through the California wringer before being sent back out again, validated by the state’s outsized influence.

Not everything out of California has been positively inspirational, or as inspirational as it might have seemed on the surface. California’s 1849 constitution may have outlawed slavery, but it granted the right to vote to white male citizens alone—denying it to Black, Chinese, and Japanese people, and to all womenThe following year, legislation barred Black people and Native Americans from giving testimony at trial against “any white person,” a stricture extended to Chinese residents in 1854.

Racial discrimination and violence runs deeply through California history. When Chinese laborers on the transcontinental railroad began to chart their own economic paths after the railroad’s completion, they became targets of resentment and discrimination by  union leaders and political demagogues. Laws constraining Chinese employment, land-owning, and freedom of movement appeared, along with mob violence. The anti-Chinese politics of California imposed its weight on federal policy, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its successors, effectively quashing all Chinese emigration.

The anti-Chinese agitators then turned their sights on the Japanese. Anti-Japanese prejudice culminated in the unpardonable policy of incarceration the U.S. visited upon Japanese residents, including American citizens of Japanese ancestry, during World War II. Among the outstanding ironies of California politics was that Earl Warren, the popular progressive governor who as Chief Justice of the U.S. wrote that landmark of court-ordered desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, was a most uncompromising advocate of the transportation of 110,000 Japanese residents of California to concentration camps.

 

Despite all the recurrent handwringing about the fate of the California dream, there has always been something mystically magnetic about the state, encompassed by more than the quest for material wealth from gold in 1849 and of oil a couple of decades later: its physical beauty, from the towering sequoias of Big Sur to the inspirational Yosemite Valley, its multifarious climate comprising a temperate coastal zone and snow-capped mountain peaks, some of the finest harbors on either coast, seemingly endless hectares of arable or irrigable land that can support everything from Greeley’s apples, oranges, olives, lemons, and grapes, to almonds, pistachios, cotton, and vast expanses of alfalfa.

California offered opportunity to those who felt their ambitions constrained by traditions of seniority in the stagnating institutions of the East. Among them was Ernest Orlando Lawrence, who was waiting his turn for advancement in the physics department at Yale when the University of California came calling in 1928 with a promise that he could take charge of his own career. He was 27. Within three years had invented the cyclotron, an atom-smasher that transformed the study of physics and placed California at the center of a scientific revolution.

Forty years later, Xerox Corporation, fat with profits from its monopoly in office copiers but fearful that new technologies might render its products obsolete, placed the laboratory assigned to “invent the future” in California, as far as one could get in distance and spirit from the convention-bound headquarters in Rochester, New York, staffing it with the smartest young scientists and engineers it could find. There they invented the personal computer. The peninsula south of San Francisco where they worked soon became known as Silicon Valley. There the confluence of intellect, money, and marketing would produce innovations and wealth on an unimaginable scale—a seedbed emulated by localities across the country and the world, but never equaled.

 

My first sojourn in California was brief—scarcely two years, after which the Los Angeles Times sent me home to New York to cover the financial industry, followed by assignments abroad. When I returned in the mid-nineties I came with a family. California was different from the state I remembered, yet somehow the same. It was still an economic powerhouse, though the aerospace industry that had fueled its growth through the postwar years had suffered a grievous collapse and was supplanted by the uniquely innovative industrial culture of Silicon Valley.

A state that had been a stronghold for Republicans at the national level was turning toward the Democrats—in 1992, Bill Clinton became the first Democratic Presidential candidate to carry the state since Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide. The transformation did not proceed along a straight line. In 1994, the state’s voters passed Proposition 187, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants but was written broadly enough to encourage police to question and detain almost anyone who looked like an undocumented immigrant, mostly because of the color of their skin. The measure was overturned by the state Supreme Court, but the wheel kept turning: The proposition proved to be the last gasp, even the death rattle, of an anti-diversity state Republican Party, which launched itself down a path of statewide political irrelevance. Orange County, that hive of reactionary Republicanism in the 1980s, was turning distinctly blue; in 2018 every one of its seven congressional seats fell to the Democrats.

Yet the vaulting self-confidence of 1980s California had begun to fade. The era of limitations was upon the state, proclaimed by its scholarly governor, Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown. Population growth strained public services, provoked a crisis in housing, and encroached upon wildlands in the hills and forests, turning wildfires into an economic threat. Increasingly frequent droughts produced water shortages and rationing. Global warming was destined to force a drastic reconsideration of water rights dating back to the 18^th century and threatened to reverse advances in environmental policies that had been among the state’s proudest achievements. How California deals with these challenges—still a work in progress—will test the California effect for decades to come.

 

To the question of what made California, we must look not only to its people but to nature.

Any relief map of California—even a view of the state through an airliner window—testifies to the extraordinary violence of its geological history, leaving what Josiah Royce, one of the state’s pioneering historians, called “tell-tale landscapes, that show at a glance the general topographical structure of the whole land.” Over the course of nearly two billion years, the geological record reflected the clash of gargantuan plates of rock and flows of magma in the subterranean depths. In these collisions, upthrusts, sideswipes, foldings and metamorphoses, gigantic blocks of granite were heaved toward the sky, pitched onto their sides, upended, turned 90 degrees; vast inland seas were filled and drained and filled again in epochal rhythms. The entire coastal land mass west of the more than 700-mile long San Andreas Fault was once the west coast of mainland Mexico, but crept inexorably north and became reattached to the continent, creating the California we recognize today.

In California, geology and geography are destiny. Wrote Royce: “Nowhere else were we Americans more affected than here, in our lives and conduct, by the feeling that we stood in the position of conquerors in a new land.”

In California, geology and geography are also prologue. The settlers beckoned west starting in the 1830s by reports of a salubrious climate and the promise of almost effortless wealth would discover upon their arrival that the landscape invited, even required, a makeover on a Promethean scale. The newcomers stripped valleys of their grasses and trees and replanted them with alien flora. They dredged and redirected and corralled riverbeds, expanded shorelines with landfill, regraded mountain passes and drove tunnels through the mountains. Every variety of human creativity was mustered to counteract the territory’s sun-baked aridity and relocate water from where it was abundant to where it was scarce. “In general, Californians have not been pleased with the natural distribution of water,” observed ecologist Allan A. Schoenherr: Given the choice between moving people to where the water is or moving the water, Californians have almost invariably done the latter, in the process creating the most elaborate aqueduct system in the world.

 

One can try to define California through numbers, some of which give a clue to its gravitational pull: The state is 163,696 square miles in area, making it the second largest in the continental United States; its population is the largest of any state by a 35-percent margin. California possesses the widest range of elevation in the United States, from the 14,496-foot Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental U.S., to Death Valley, at 280 feet below sea level the lowest point, the two landmarks less than 90 miles apart as the crow flies.

Yet the raw statistics by themselves cannot provide an adequate picture of the diversity of the land, which encompasses some of the richest farmland in the country and some of its most desolate moonscapes. It is not just outsiders who have concluded, now and then, that California is too big and too variegated to be just one state; that has occurred to Californians too, now and then, when the interests of northerners and southerners, or rural folk and city dwellers, appear to have diverged so completely that it can be hard to conceive of them as members of the same species.

I conceived this book as an examination of all that California has taught the rest of America and the world. This was during the Trump Administration. “California values,” at least as they represented progressive policies, had seldom been so vibrantly on display. Then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra would ultimately file 122 lawsuits against the administration, including nine cases on Trump’s last day in office. The state had worked to build a legal bulwark against the full spectrum of Trump policy-making, including his efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act and the Endangered Species Act and to roll back emission regulations. California was on the winning side of the vast majority of these cases at the trial and appellate levels of federal courts.

The topic turned out to be vastly deeper and more complex than I anticipated and, gratifyingly, more fascinating. Many California values as they developed over the centuries may have been less uplifting than its liberal campaign against the Trump White House, but they were profoundly influential nonetheless.

From the coming of the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century to the dawning of the 21^st, California has held the imagination of the outside world in thrall, offering inspiration, instruction, and admonition. To understand how that came about and why it continues to be, we must start at the beginning.