path. San Francisco had a meteoric rise of its own in the 19th century, dominating the Pacific Coast, and the Bay Area remains one of the country’s largest urban regions. San Diego and Sacramento are major cities in their own right, but one can hardly tell any more where one urban area ends and the next begins along the South Coast or Central California. California’s infrastructure, from highways to electrical grids, is another of its great achievements, and one that marks the landscape so strongly that it merits extended treatment in Chapters 4 and 5. Energy supply is the crux of the matter, a foundation for economic and urban growth and deeply implicated in potential disasters to come from rampant climate change. Cities and buildings, highways and ships, water supply and farms are the major arenas of energy use, and hence key targets for California’s efforts to develop new energy policies and technologies to cope with global warming. The state will not be able come to grips with climate change, however, without altering profoundly Californians’ ways of doing things, from driving to drinking, and these changes are likely to demand a radical reworking of California’s infrastructure and the landscape depicted in this atlas. California’s success is about more than innovation and industry, of course. It is a political achievement in which people have fought for their principles and their well-being, for better and more helpful government programs, and to keep the doors open to new generations and new ideas. Politics and government appear here in Chapter 2, but matters of political concern, public policy, and government run through all the chapters of this volume. Politically, California owes much of its success to popular movements that changed the face of the state, and ultimately shaped its people, economy, and geography. These movements include struggles by workers and unions to maintain good pay and benefits; by suffragists to open up democratic participation, and by women for comparable-worth wages; by Chinese and Japanese protective organizations to resist anti-Asian racism and cruelty; by African American and Chicano civil rights campaigners to end school, housing, and employment segregation; by the disabled and homosexuals to liberate society from ancient prejudices; and by too many others to recount here. Even though this is not an historical atlas, it does provide some key background facts that explain how California has come to be what it is today. Because of the efforts of its people to carve out political and geographic space for everyone to live more fruitful lives, California became a more civilized place. It went from a raw and bleeding frontier to a civilization of a special kind: one that sought to provide a good education for all, a fair shake for working people, a decent retirement and healthcare for everyone, a racially impartial society, and much more. California became a model of enlightened governance in the postwar era, known for its social liberalism as compared with most of the Cold War United States. It still stands out in some regards today, as in the striking majorities won by President Obama in 2008 and 2012, as noted in Chapter 2; or in the rapid adoption of ObamaCare provisions by the state and its forward-looking treatment of preschoolers, as discussed in Chapter 7. But the political history of California is by no means entirely a shining tale of progress and justice. On the contrary, there is a dark side to the state’s history, full of failure, suffering, conflict, murder, even genocide. This is why perpetuating the myth of the California Dream does more than mislead us as to the origins of California’s success; it does serious harm by obscuring the damage done to the land, the people and the commonweal by those without scruples, social controls, or thought for tomorrow. The brutal face of California is first revealed in the terrible fate of the Native Peoples, discussed in Chapter 1. It continues through such nasty epochs as Chinese exclusion, alien land laws, and Philippine conquest,
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and thence to Japanese internment in World War II, exploitation of Bracero “guest workers”, beating of farm labor organizers, and blaming “illegal aliens” for budget shortfalls. Not everyone has shared in the California Dream. Racism has often served a useful purpose for those who benefitted from the dominant position of White people. Miners profited from the slave labor of natives, Irish benefitted from tighter labor markets incurred through boycotts of Chinese workers, and Okies were able to move to the cities when Braceros were imported to do farm work. Even clearer are the benefits won by upper-class Whites, by such means as paying lower wages to “colored labor”, eliminating Japanese farmers as competitors, creating exclusive residential areas in cities and suburbs, and more. The misuse of power has been a repeated theme in California history, from the state’s birth as a child of colonialism to its 20th century role as a military launchpad for American wars and adventures around the world. If the Spanish empire left traces in crumbling missions, a few presidios and many lovely place names, while the Russians left only a single site, Fort Ross, the American empire continues to leave a deep imprint on California geography. This has been the most militarized of all the states, as shown in Chapter 2. Militarized crime control has left its mark, as well, in the Golden Gulag of prisons and jails across the state, and a more subtle one on the legal codes, the make-up of the judiciary, and lives of millions of young men of color. These tangible geographies of power are closely linked to California politics, as well. The state was a leader in the neo-conservative wave of the last two generations (often called, confusingly, “neo-liberalism”). California sent Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980, along with half his cabinet, where they presided over a political revolution, one that dismantled much of the New Deal/Social Welfare state in the US and introduced a new set of principles based on freeing up markets, cutting taxes and shrinking government, and letting the successful get richer and the unsuccessful fend for themselves. California led the pack in many of the key domains of neo-conservative policy: the wars on crime and drugs, deregulating banks and finance, and building up the border wall between the US and Mexico. Most famously, it gave birth to the “tax revolt” with Proposition 13 in 1978, among other revenue-reducing accomplishments. The effects of these political shifts on government, budgets, and incarceration are detailed in Chapter 2. State and local governments in California have been hovering on bankruptcy for 30 years, and several cities and school districts have tipped over the edge. For years the parties, the legislature and the governor’s office have been deadlocked and ineffective, while too many of the enlightened features of California’s postwar civilization have eroded: schools, universities, pensions, healthcare, safety, housing—and, one might say, even humanity towards one another. This comes at the worst time possible, just as the state needs to cope with the education of millions of young people of color—the legacy of mass immigration to feed the booming labor markets of the 1970s and 1980s. The schools and colleges are bursting at the seams at the same time as they are having their budgets slashed, making it that much harder for young people to get a good education. On top of this, healthcare costs in California, as throughout the US, have skyrocketed, weighing heavily on the budgets of households, corporations, and governments trying to care for the sick and aged. But the state is not doing the job it should in seeing to it that all its citizens are adequately insured or that they have sufficient pensions to live out their days without want, as discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. Today, the shine has gone off the Golden State. So it is more important than ever to take the mythology of California’s blessings and success with a grain of salt. There is a sense of fading glory, despite the gloss of iPhones and Oscars. On the whole, the California economy has stumbled into the 21st century, despite the fame of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and the billions racked up by high tech and entertainment giants like Apple and Disney.
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California has created too few new jobs for too long, and it absolutely cratered in the Great Recession, with over 2 million workers unemployed and some of the highest unemployment rates in the country, whether measured by state, county, or metropolitan area. This was the vortex of the housing bubble, with more price inflation and bad loans than any other state, ending with a crash that left more lost value, house foreclosures and underwater mortgages than anywhere in the world, as we note in Chapter 4. Recovery has been slow and painful, even five years after the crash. The problems run even deeper than recession indicators or government budget deficits, however. While California has a long history as a financial center and a place of periodic financial shenanigans, as discussed in Chapter 3, it has been Wall Street West when it comes to the present age of greed, going back to Michael Milken’s dodgy Junk Bond empire run out of LA and the Savings and Loan debacle of the 1980s. In the 2000s, California banks such as Countrywide Savings and Golden West Savings were the worst offenders in issuing subprime, adjustable rate, and jumbo mortgages, setting up homeowners for
