California is just a sliver of the globe, a slice off the west coast of North America, one state among many United States; but it is more, much more. California is a world apart, a region unto itself, a state within a state, a place with its own character. New York, Washington DC, and Texas all feel very far away in outlook and obsessions. If, as a famous coffee company’s slogan has it, “geography is a flavor”, then California is one of the most distinctive and full-bodied. To draw up an atlas of California requires considerable imagination. It is a hard state to get one’s head—and compass—around. This is about more than its slightly crooked torso and varied landforms. It is about more than geographic subregions that so shape the life and outlook of residents, dividing Northern and Southern Californians at the Tehachapis, urbanites west of the Coast Ranges from farmers in the interior, or rainforest dwellers on the North Coast from desert denizens by the Salton Sea. It is about the way human history is deeply imprinted on the landscape in the form of gargantuan cities climbing the foothills of the San Gabriels, mines and tailings in the Sierra foothills, and farms stretching for miles across the Imperial Valley. The human geography of California is sometimes plainly evident, as in roads and skyscrapers, but sometimes obscure, like the toil of farmworkers or the quality of schools. A critical task of an atlas such as this is to make visible key facets of the human landscape of this great state. Because it is a place apart, California is rife with myths. One of the most persistent is that it is “The Coast”, a place of hippies and stars, not to be taken too seriously; yet what happens here is of crucial importance to the country, and sometimes the world. One reason is that California is not the mythic land of sun and surf, a place of leisure, but a center of industry, technology, and work. As a result, it is not the afterthought of the manufacturing Midwest or the New South, but the principal motor of the American economy. Another persistent myth is that people come to California for its balmy climate and decide to stay, rather than be drawn by jobs on offer by that economy, by the desire to rejoin distant friends and families, or by the need to escape dangers at home. Californians’ favorite origin myths dwell on the misty realms of the past. In Northern California, pride of place is held by the legend of the Gold Rush, with the hardy pioneers of 1849 facing adversity but finding gold aplenty (carried away by picturesque Wells Fargo stagecoaches). From this comes the moniker, The Golden State. Even though the easy gold ran out quickly, the Gold Rush is still seen recapitulated in every boom time from Comstock Silver to Silicon Valley. The Southern California origin myth is different, since the Gold Rush barely touched the region. Instead, the tale oft told is that of the civilizing role of the Spanish Missions, which enter the state from the south. The Mission Dream is embodied in plays and movies, but especially in the colonial revival architecture of the early 20th century which embellishes cities from Santa Barbara to Riverside. Astonishing as it may seem, California school children still have their impressionable heads filled up with these “just-so” stories in the required year of state history doled out in the 4th grade. Worse, they are likely never to get another lesson about what transpired after those founding moments of modern California—let alone what might be just plain wrong with these idyllic pictures of the state’s history. The most popular myth of all is undoubtedly the California Dream, which means anything and everything that people might imagine about their futures—and hence nothing solid at all. It is invoked to explain everything from farm settlement to postwar suburbs. Californians have had many dreams, and some have come true; but the real question is why dreams succeed or why they fail. If the California Dream has a germ of truth, it must be based on political economic realities, not merely the fantasies of literature, cinema, or theater.
Introduction
In this atlas, we eschew the usual myths for a more hard-nosed look at the Golden State, its successes and failures, its past and present, its human and natural contours. The real building blocks of California’s success have been the wealth of nature, an abundance of labor, and economic innovation, backed by a strong measure of good government. California has had the great luck, owing to its physical geography, to be sitting on mountains of gold and silver, great pools of oil, fast-moving rivers, thick forests, and some of the best farmland on earth—not to mention a favorable climate for growing things. The Gold Rush myth rests on this natural abundance, which went far beyond placer deposits, and which ended up back in Sacramento and San Francisco where it could be spent and invested on industrial development and urban expansion. Neither Spanish padres nor Anglo health-seekers after the sun had much to do with the growth of Los Angeles: oil and citrus launched modern Southern California. Even movies and aircraft came later. California grew out of its land, first of all, as we note in Chapter 1. California has benefited equally from the wealth of labor it drew in, and the aspirations of this ever-plentiful stream of people have been key to the idea of the California Dream. And, yes, folks came here full of hope, but they also came bearing valuable skills and heads full of knowledge and new ideas. Their payoff was good, too, and not just for the winners and stars. Coming to the Golden State worked out well for millions of the ordinary folk who built the cities and farms, laid down roads and levees, and manufactured cars and tractors. Yes, there were geniuses like Lee DeForest and Steve Jobs, but most people contributed by hard work, an improvement here and there, and acting as part of teams with collective dreams. Hence, Chapter 1 shows the land filling with people, who came in waves that broke our California’s shores, creating an amazing diversity unlike anywhere in the USA or even the world. With them came a dream of a mingled humanity from every continent that continues to this day. California has also been one of the great economic success stories in human history, and it has grown by leaps and bounds. Success in a capitalist world economy is never a static thing; it demands endless self-renewal by companies, nations, and regions. This endless renewal and growth has been the third foundation of the California Dream. The wealth of labor had to be put to work: producing more output, creating and using new machines, developing new industries, planting and processing new kinds of crops, designing and building new highways and houses, and more. Chapter 3 provides some windows on this process. California has been a technological hot-house. The developments here of pumps, nozzles, drills, and more, revolutionized global mining in the 19th century and later the oil industry. The state also invented modern agribusiness, based on food processing, massive dams, and modern fertilizers. It became an industrial powerhouse, surpassing the Midwest as the frontier of American genius, just as the latter had previously surpassed New England. Hollywood created new cameras, color film and sound, as well as the studio and star systems. LA aircraft companies designed single-wing planes, jet engines and mass assembly. Bay Area inventors came up with the vacuum tube, loudspeaker and television—all long before Silicon Valley. New things introduced in California have spread far and wide, changing the world. Some of these are everyday tools like the computer mouse and windows invented in Palo Alto, or the Google search engine, brain child of two Stanford students. Some are closely identified with California, like the fiberglass surfboard, while others, like the Zamboni ice resurfacer, are a surprise. Some are high tech, such as guidance systems for NASA rockets, while others are cultural, such as the Berkeley coffee-bar model copied by Starbucks. The economic fertility of California is not principally a matter of soil or sunshine, but of cities. California is a highly urbanized state and cities are the principal arenas of economic growth in the modern era. Cities are where capital, labor, and trade are concentrated,
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where new ideas are most likely to blossom and bear fruit. Indeed, today the very largest metropolitan regions are outgrowing smaller cities around the world. As shown in Chapter 4, Los Angeles set the pace throughout the 20th century, and greater LA has
