July 7, 2025 • 53 mins
California has always been a mirror—and a magnifier—of the American spirit. In this solo episode, I trace the evolution of the California Dream: from gold rush ambition to postwar abundance to modern gridlock. Drawing heavily on the work of historian Kevin Starr, I explore how California came to represent both utopia and disillusionment and ask what it would take to dream again.
Chapters
00:00 - The Evolution of the California Dream
07:29 - The Dream is Born:1850-1900
18:38 - Industry, Imagination, and Infrastructure: 1900-WWII
34:24 - Post-War California: Maturity and Growth
46:26 - Is California Still Spectacular?
Keywords: California Dream, California history, Kevin Starr, Gold Rush, California Future Society, postwar boom, California housing crisis, dynamism, anti-growth politics, American Dream, California decline, Silicon Valley, aerospace, agriculture, suburbanization, Great Depression, immigration in California, California political culture, Los Angeles, San Francisco, opportunity, mobility, American West, Grapes of Wrath, boosterism, state identity, utopia vs dystopia, California economy
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
California, from its origin as an American state, was premised
on this notion of a gold rush ofinstant transformation, of
opportunity, of if I can go to this place, my life might be
better off. You see this?
Period of utopian settlements ofnew agricultural communities
almost. This has startup society energy
and says California had long since become one of the prisms
(00:22):
through which the American people, for better and for
worse, could glimpse their future.
Hello everyone, and welcome backto the California Future through
Society podcast. This week I have an episode that
I've been chewing on for a long time now, and it's the evolution
of the California dream. This is something I've been
thinking about because selfishly, for my own life, my
(00:43):
own thinking, my own writing, myown work, I've been wanting to
have a better understanding of where the state is going.
And I don't think I'm alone. I think a lot of Californians
feel this way. They feel a sense of of loss or
uncertainty or. Maybe the best way to put it is
that the. Story and the narrative that we
tell ourselves about the state no longer rings true for a lot
(01:04):
of people. We'll get into.
That of why that is, and what pieces are perhaps most out of
sync with reality. But I think.
Anytime you're in a situation where the narrative you tell
yourself about, whether it's yourself or your family or your
career or the place you live in or your city, or in this case,
your state, no longer rings true, you're forced to come up
(01:26):
with a new narrative, to come upwith a new story and a new sense
of direction and purpose about who you are and where you're
heading. We'll get into some of the more
specifics throughout this episode.
My goal is to go through the history of the state as concise
as possible and have an understanding of what the dream
(01:46):
has looked like through California's evolution so that
by the end, you know, we can have at least some semblance of
a of a foundation to think about.
Where is the state heading? What is the future of the state
going to look like? And what does it take to get
Californians dreaming again? Obviously, this is a massive
topic. This is something that feels a
(02:07):
little bit crazy trying to bite this off all in one episode.
So you'll have to let me know how you feel like I did at the
end. There's going to be entire
chapters and sections of the state that just get completely
left out. And that's just the way it is.
If you, unless you wanted me to sit here and record for, you
know, 12 hours, like I'm Dan Carlin covering all the
intricacies in his hardcore history episodes of, you know, a
certain war campaign. It's it's too much.
(02:31):
So it's a massive topic. So in order to try and cover as
concisely as possible in a single episode, I, I lean on my
friend Kevin Starr, which if you're watching the video, you
can see me holding up his book series on the California dream.
You can see there's eight books here.
It's over 3000 pages in total. And it's all based around
(02:53):
California history, different chapters of the state's history,
united by this idea of the California dream being the
central kind of narrative feature, narrative structure for
understanding what the state is and where it's going.
Just a quick read of some of histitles.
Are, you know, material dreams, Inventing the dream, Endangered
dreams, golden dreams and battledreams.
The dream endures California on the edge, Coast of dreams.
(03:16):
Set those down. So I've read all those books.
They're incredible. If you care about California
history and you want to understand the state better, by
far and away Kevin Starr is a place to start.
He was a 7th generation Californian born in 1940.
He. Pretty much spent his entire
life, his entire career chronicling in California,
understanding the state and documenting it, which I think is
(03:38):
really cool. Just regardless of the topic to
anyone has for anyone who has a a degree of focus and passion
about a specific thing to then spend their entire life
dedicated to understanding it more.
I think there's a lot of beauty in a life lived.
That way. And he's really good at blending
not just the economic and political analysis, but also
(04:00):
some of these cultural ideas. He's really into cultural
history. And like I said, he talks about
the dream and how it evolves through history.
So my goal is to the extent possible and for my own
purposes, I'm not trying to givea one for one breakdown of
here's how Kevin Starr thinks about the where we are today in
California. He's he's passed away, but it
(04:21):
his books are far and away the best resources for understanding
California. So I'm going to lean on them
heavily and I'm going to quote him specifically or specifically
I'm going to quote from this book California History, which
was his shorter version, kind ofsingle volume, 300 page book
summarizing state history. If I quote from him, that's the
book I'm quoting from, which by just as a side note, if any of
(04:43):
you care about California history, you want a single
volume place to start. And biting off 3000 pages of
cross eight books sounds intimidating.
That California History by KevinStarr is far and away the best
single volume history of California that I've ever come
across. OK, so the way I'm going to
structure this episode is by going through with painting with
(05:03):
a really broad but brush, think through the major chapters of
states, the state's history, andthen ending on just a
conversation about where California is today and the
reason I think this matters. Just as a.
Starting point is by recognizingthat the California Dream is
bigger than just California. I'm going to say that again, The
(05:25):
California Dream is bigger than just California.
So what do I mean by that? Well, there's a famous quote
from Wallace Stegner saying thatCalifornia is like the rest of
the United States, only more so.California is like the rest of
the United States, only more so,meaning that California is this
concentrated dose of the American identity that
(05:46):
California strengths and its weaknesses embody the American
ideals, the American personality.
And so, you know, while I come at this conversation and about
thinking about the California dream, specifically concerned
about the state and the state's trajectory, I think it's
important to know that in tryingto understand California better,
(06:06):
you understand America better. And there's a quote from Kevin
Starr in. That book that he talks about?
How California remains an American place perhaps the most
American of American places prophesying the growing
diversity of the United States and.
Dot dot dot, he said and says. California had long since become
one of the prisms through which the American people, for better
and for worse, could glimpse their future.
(06:32):
A friend of mine. A former professor of mine.
She. Once travelled to East Asia,
stopped in cities like Singaporeor Hong Kong and Shanghai, and
she came back and she said, I feel like I've seen the future,
right? These are some of the the latest
and greatest cities with clean, modern, exciting infrastructure,
LED lights all across the sky, she said.
It felt like I was I was in the future and what seeing what
(06:54):
cities around the world could look like down the road.
For most of California's history, California has been
that place where people arrived and they came to and they said
I've seen the future. Or if you were an American or
from anywhere around the world and you're wanting to seek
opportunity, you wanting to seekout what the future could look
like, California was the place that you came.
(07:15):
To see it, I think it's a good place to start as a foundation.
And then, like I said, we're going to go through history.
So to start, we're going to talkthrough this first period.
Right the calling it the the thedream is born 1850 to roughly
1900 or so and why 1850 right 1849 that is the gold rush that
is when California surges in to its American identities
(07:36):
relatively soon after the Mexican American war where
California becomes American territory American land rather
and then it becomes a state veryquickly Kevin Starr writes the
very acceleration of California into an American Commonwealth
had been the result of a gold rush with.
All that such beginnings implied.
(07:59):
For the perception of Californiaas a place where note this part,
where human beings might breakthrough the constraints of
day-to-day life and come into possession of something
immeasurably better, right. California from its origin as an
American state was premised on this notion of a gold rush,
(08:20):
premised on this notion of of instant transformation, of
opportunity, of if I can go to this place, my life might be
better off, even if it's just a purely material sense of I might
be able to strike gold in these early days.
So from the very beginning, California clicks and into the
American imagination, it shows up on the scene as this place of
(08:43):
instant transformation and opportunity.
And another quote just to give you a sense of the pace of how
quickly things transformed in California following the Gold
rush. Within the following two years,
the Gold Rush fast forwarded California into what historian
Hubert Bancroft would later describe as a rapid monstrosity
maturity. By 1849, the non-native American
(09:06):
population of California was approaching 100,000 people, up
from less than 10,000 people just the year before.
Even more astonishingly, California had organized itself
as a state bypassing territorialstatus, and it held elections
and was petitioning Congress foradmission into the union.
Within three years of President Pope's announcement, the
non-native American population had soared to 255,000 people and
(09:30):
a new metropolis, San Francisco,had sprung into existence like
Atlantis rising from the sea just a few decades later.
Kevin Starr writes that by 1870,San Francisco, with a population
of over 149,000 people, was the 10th largest city in the United
States, a remarkable developmentfor a city that did not formally
(09:51):
exist in 1846. So California shows up out of
nowhere and it bypasses territorial status like they
know because so many people surge in and it becomes a state,
even though the surrounding landin the American West was not yet
achieved statehood. That's what leads to what some
historians call the idea of one historical book on California
(10:15):
that I love. It's titled California, an
Island in the Land, right? California is developing in
relative isolation. And it comes, it arrives with
this air of, of, of mystery and excitement for the American
people. Kevin Starr, when he's talking
about the land itself, he talks about California was a kind of
island sealed off by the Pacific, the Sierra Nevada, the
Klamath and Cascade Ranges in the north and the Mojave Desert
(10:37):
in the southeast. Our natural landscapes and our
intense natural beauty somewhat shielded the state from the rest
of the country. So California is this far off
mythical place. And like I said at the very
beginning, the dream of California was one of risk and
reward. So gold rush.
(10:58):
Is not for everyone. If you're established, if you
are someone who has a well established life on the East
Coast, you're not going to uproot and take a boat ride
across the country to try and get to California to see gold.
Who seeks gold? It's the opportunists.
It's the strivers. It's.
(11:19):
The people who feel like they'vebeen left out are in have a high
risk tolerance and are in seek in pursuit of a better life.
Kevin Starr writes about this. He calls it a rush, a mass
migration of mainly younger men and some of middle age from all
corners of the earth, including China and Australia, who
ventured everything, their livesincluded as one in 12 would die
(11:40):
in the process on the gamble that they could strike it rich
and thereby break to a better life.
Such a hope, such a psychology of expectation, fused the
American or the Californian experience irretrievably onto a
dream of better days, of a sudden, almost magical
transformation of the ordinary. So these are the people who are
showing up to California early on, and that shapes the state
(12:04):
and the expectations that peoplehave of the state.
I don't have time to go into allthe details, but the, yeah, it
was horrifically violent. The murder rate, and it wasn't
just for the people who came here, is also for the native
population. There's a whole story there,
roughly one out of I think it was I was reading what 1/3 of
the native population was estimated upon.
Columbus's rival lived in the California broader California
(12:27):
area and native population is nearly extinct by 1870.
Now a lot of that happened underthe Spanish system, the Spanish
mission era before that, but it was also accelerated during this
time, even though a lot of the deaths that already happened
during this gold rush era. This.
This like I said. For better and for worse, this
American impulse to control the land.
And so again, I don't have time to go into that.
(12:48):
But in addition to the gold rush, I think another core
pillar up to the California dream at this time was one of an
experimentation and a relative blank slate, right?
California is this massive land.A lot of it was not inhabited to
have after, you know, 90% of thenative population had died by
something like 1850 or somethinglike that.
(13:10):
Until you see this time period of utopian settlements of new
agricultural communities, almostthis kind of startup society
energy happening where people from across the country, from
across the world show up and saywe're going to start a new city,
we're going to start a new town,we're going to start a new
community. A lot of them are affiliated
around different religious communities or social groups.
(13:32):
Some were secular or even just agricultural communities like
the hometown, My hometown Upland, which is was part of the
Ontario Water Colony project at the time.
George Chafee and his brother, they just said, hey, we can
figure out how to get water here.
And so anyone can come buy a little plot of land.
They buy into the water system and then they're able to grow
citrus and other produce and setup new life and I think.
(13:58):
That. That is also a core part of this
early part of California history, the California dream.
It's a place where you can experiment, where there's not an
existing social structure and you have to climb the existing
ladder, right? I, I use the phrase startup
society intentionally, right? People join startups because
(14:18):
startups represent opportunity not only for growth, but also
for greater responsibility than you might get in an existing
company, right? If when you're working at a
massive company corporation, youhave to climb the ladder, you
have to pay your dues. Even if you're a hotshot, if
you're in a massive firm like a Goldman Sachs or something like
that, you can climb the ladder quickly, but it still is going
to take some time. Versus if you're in a start up
(14:39):
and you show up and you're an incredible engineer from day
one, you can very quickly becomethe CTO, right?
You can be a 25 year old CTO when the CEO themself is only,
let's say 26 years old, right? There's more opportunity for
upward growth and beyond the gold rush, California continued
to develop through these booms and busts that promised people
(15:00):
opportunity and and and new waysof living, Kevin Starr writes.
Not for California. There would be, nor would there
ever be, as it turned out, a deliberate process of
development. California would rather.
Develop impetuously through booms of people and abrupt
releases of energy. These abrupt releases of energy,
(15:21):
new people showing up, new people hoping that there's new
opportunity. So that's I think the core, the
core pillar. If you can only take one thing
away from this early chapter of California, what is it?
It's this idea of this, this gold rush hope for the future of
the state. Now, I've hinted at in a few
ways, but there's also this fundamental question of the time
(15:43):
that continues to show up throughout the state and is
continuing. You know, it's still a
discussion today of who exactly gets to participate in the
dream, right? When a place offers opportunity
and it offers wealth and instanttransformation, everyone wants a
piece of that. And because of that, you then
get challenges, especially during the hard times of who
(16:05):
you. Allow to participate in the
dream. So we'll talk about more of this
later and how different, you know, racial minorities were
treated. But you can even see this in the
beginning, right when it's talking about the railroad.
Kevin Starr writes about how throughout its history, American
California has always imported its labor when necessary.
(16:27):
So specifically talking about the railroad, he says there is
not enough men in California willing to do this sort of back
breaking work at the price that the railroad owners were willing
to pay serving the labor pool ofCalifornia.
Crocker, the the person who's running the railroad could see
that there is thousands of Chinese in the state, most of
whom had for reasons of racial exclusion been marginalized out
of mainstream employment. He would eventually have some
(16:48):
10,000 in his employ and cumulatively over the next four
years that Chinese. Workers would achieve an epic of
construction second only to the Great Wall of China itself.
So I. Think this is important.
I'm not going to go into all thedetails about the railroad and
and the Chinese population there.
But we see in California historythis repeated pattern of of
opportunity of new people pursuing that opportunity and
(17:10):
people surging in to take part in the dream and then facing
some type of exclusion along theway as a result.
So here we see this intentional cultivation of Chinese labor.
Later on, there would be different laws prohibiting
Chinese immigration to the state.
We'll talk about this more in the 1930s.
But you saw whether it's different ethnic groups within
America or from around the world, people surging into
(17:30):
California seeking opportunity and and growth and then later
facing some type of restriction or some type of challenge.
And I raised this just because Ithink it's an important part.
Of the California Dream as well.We're in a moment in National
History, 2025. Of, you know, debates around
immigration and, and, and who isAmerican and, and what, what
does this look like? And I think these battles have
(17:54):
always been fought in California, first and foremost,
and you see that. So I just wanted to note that
we'll, we'll touch on that a little bit more later on.
So by the end of this chapter, right, wrapping up this early
chapter of roughly 1850 to roughly 1900, California has
this surge, this this influx of people and energy, but it's
still is largely empty. Around this time, kind of
(18:17):
started writing that California was for all practical purposes,
empty, larger than Great Britain, Holland, Belgium,
Denmark, and Greece combined. The state did not contain the
population. Of even a third ranked modern
city so. The California dream of this
time is still one of opportunityand excitement, but it still has
yet to evolve into the California that we would know
(18:38):
later on. So that moves us into then.
Part Two, 19102 Let's call it upto the World War Two 1940s, one
of a time of industry, imagination and infrastructure.
It's almost like a time of California kind of being like a
teenager. It's coming into its own.
It's starting to develop more traits and the California dream
is starting to take more shape, but it's still not yet fully
(19:01):
developed in the way that we know it today.
OK, so a checkpoint at this timein California's population.
Kevin Starr writes that at the 20th century dawn, the
population of California stood at roughly 1.5 million people,
quite a small figure for such a vast state.
Nearly half this population was living in the San Francisco Bay
(19:23):
Area with San Diego with a population slightly under 18,000
remaining. A venerable but inconsiderable
settlement in Los Angeles barelypassing the 100,000 person mark
across the next decade. The interurban electric Big Red
cars of the Pacific Electric Railway, incorporated in 19 O1
(19:43):
would connect the city of Angeles of Los Angeles.
To most of the cities and towns in the Los Angeles Plain,
transforming Los Angeles into the hub of Southern California
with a population of 319,000 by 1910, right?
It's almost tripling. Over a decade.
And in addition, not to leave out San Francisco, my friends up
north, there's another quote that's saying that by the early
1900s, San Francisco had a higher proportion of foreign
(20:06):
born residents relative to its total population than any other
city in the United States, including New York.
Anyways, OK, so at this point inCalifornia history, San
Francisco is established, the foundation has been laid, and
the city is this global hub thanks to the boom of the Gold
Rush and Southern California is starting.
To chug along, it's starting to catch up, but it still has a
(20:29):
long ways to go and the most notable part about this switch
from the pre 1900s to the early 1900s is that along the way in
the late 19th century California.
Builds the railroad. To the rest of the country, so.
What is the? California Dream at this time
(20:49):
it's this idea of boosterism, particularly in Southern
California, but it's boosters and being, you know these real
estate developers who are tryingto hype up the rest of the
country, convince them and persuade them through marketing
and advertising campaigns that you need to move to California
because this. Is where the opportunity is.
So this already was happening during the gold rush, but that
(21:11):
quickly fizzled out as the opportunity was taken.
And so the foundation of the California dream was already
laid, right? It's this place of opportunity.
It's this place where you can have instant transformation,
create wealth, seek out opportunity.
And now they pour gasoline onto that fire.
And they specifically target people who they think could come
(21:32):
and buy the land, primarily in Southern California but
elsewhere in the state as well, and get their slice.
Of the good life, there's this poster that'll pull up but I
love. From this era, it's very famous.
It's called California, the Cornucopia.
Of the world. Room for millions of immigrants
43,000,000 acres of government land.
(21:53):
Untaken railroad and private land for a million farmers.
A climate. For health and wealth free of
cyclones and blizzards. So you know these early
prototypical Mad Men type people.
Are trying to convince the rest of the country hey come out here
this is the time of. Of, of a great example of
boosterism is the Rose Parade, right, which was established in
(22:16):
the early 20th century. And the literal idea was that,
hey, while you're freezing in Buffalo or Rochester, you know,
anywhere on the East Coast, we're literally out here having
a parade with fresh flowers strolling our way down Pasadena
in January because our climate is so mild and lovely.
And again, this was happening throughout the state, but
(22:37):
Southern California really was the the heart of this
boosterism. And there's kind of two.
Pillars to this California dream, this California identity
that that was sold at this time and they still carry over
somewhat today. The first one is is one of its
Spanish roots. This is when kind of the
mythology around the Spanish roots took place.
Kevin Starr writes that the perception of Southern
(22:58):
California as an imagined Spanish place, shimmery and
romantic, function like a pseudohistory upon the region.
Anchoring it in a mythic time and place that manifested itself
in architecture. Place names for developing
townships, local festivals and later motion pictures and
popular song. So if you're in Southern
California, you know, there's somany cities have Spanish names,
(23:20):
Spanish identities. Certain cities like Santa
Barbara or other cities have thekind of distinct Spanish
architecture that wasn't there from day one.
In a lot of these places. A lot of it was kind of infused
or grafted on to the town and the area later on during this
period as part of this kind of celebration of this history, but
(23:41):
often a celebration of this history by people who would move
to California during this time. So I think that's interesting as
a Southern California. The other pillar in addition to
this kind of Spanish Mediterraneanism is, is 1 of
agriculture, right? The cornucopia of the world idea
is one that gets used a lot. And that's because at
California, agriculture was unique and was extensive and was
(24:03):
really effective. Kevin Starr writes that as far
as agriculture was agriculture was concerned, Northern
California witnessed the triumphof wheat in the 1870s and 80s
when it led the nation in wheat production.
And then thanks to the refrigerated railcar, California
produce could buy the 1890s reach Eastern markets within a
week. So that's by the early 1900s.
A veritable sea of citrus Groves, orange, lemon and
(24:23):
grapefruit ran from the interiorcounties of Riverside and San
Bernardino, where I'm from. Shout out into Los Angeles
headed for the coast and this LED.
To several famous brands, right?Brands like Sun Kissed.
It was kind of this cooperative of the orange growers in
Southern California created thisbrand to do the national
marketing before their produce. Or similarly, Sun made raisins,
(24:44):
which I feed my toddler. Seems like every other day we're
having some sun made raisins. The woman in the the field with
a bonnet harvesting raisins. So these are these are these
agricultural brands, the idea ofSouthern California and all of
California as this place of of agricultural wealth played into
this idea of it being a Mediterranean paradise, a place
(25:05):
of health and wealth. And other historians have talked
about the nature, how the natureof California's land and seasons
enabled it to have a lot of veryhighly specialized growing
seasons and specialized fruit and vegetables.
I think something like 2/3 of the nation's fruit and
vegetables come from California,a lot of it from the Central
Valley, because we have such a unique climate.
(25:28):
So there's two factors to that. One is what I just said, that we
could produce a large variety offruits and vegetables that
couldn't be produced on the restof the country and at a really
large scale. So it would become kind of this,
this bread basket of the nation.The second feature of that,
talking about this idea of needing to import labor, which
is what this other historian, Kerry McWilliams talks a lot
(25:48):
about, is that because you have these highly concentrated
growing seasons that sometimes are even, you know, down to just
a couple weeks all throughout the state, what resulted was
that you needed a highly mobile labor force of a lot of people
who could very quickly assemble in one place or another, which
then led. To some of the.
Workforce dynamics and labor dynamics around California farm
laborers that Cesar Chavez and others would would highlight
(26:11):
later on, but the foundation. For that was laid during this
period where you had a. Lot of these.
Agricultural seasons going on. So the California dream at this
time was that California is a place that anyone can build a
new life. And we had this incredible
explosive population growth during this time.
The population of California continued from, let's see, 2.3
million people in 1910. By 1930 were up to 5 million
(26:33):
people and then by 1940 were up to 6.9.
Now of course for. Anyone who knows American
history 1900 two World War 21940were not purely peaceful steady
times in America primarily because of the Great Depression
in the 1930s. And California was not immune
(26:53):
from the challenges of the GreatDepression.
And if anything, this Californiadream, this place of of
opportunity, welcoming millions of immigrants and people from
around the world between the Great Depression and then World
War 2, became a place where, youknow, open our arms and
subsequently close them to different people.
You know, just rattling off a few examples here.
You know, it's like the Mexican American population.
(27:15):
So between 1920 and 1930, Kevin Starr writes, the Mexican
American population in the city of Los Angeles, the single
largest minority group in the city, tripled from 33,000 to
97,000. And Los Angeles surpassed San
Antonio as the leading Mexican American community in the United
States. And it has a Mexican American
population larger than all but afew cities in Mexico.
(27:36):
Now, then during the 1930s, whenthe economy tanked and we were
in the Great Depression, there'sthis forcible repatriation of
Mexicans, including Mexican Americans, back to Mexico by the
federal government. And Kevin Starr describes this
as a program that can only be described as ethnic cleansing,
where estimates vary widely. But somewhere from 300,000 to 2
(27:57):
million people were repatriated.Roughly half of them were
actually American citizens. At a smaller scale, the African
American community at this time,it's known that it's, you know,
small is approximately 5000 people, but it's very
prosperous. Los Angeles had the highest rate
of homeownership of black Americans.
I think it was around 1930. But then there's a great book,
The Coveted West Side, that documents this in great detail.
(28:20):
But Los Angeles in California was not immune from things like
racial housing covenants and things like that that ended up
becoming a lot more restrictive about who could live where and
leading to a lot of racial animosity later on.
Obviously the Japanese American population due to internment
during World War 2, you know, things changed dramatically.
Kevin Starr talks about how between 1910 and 1924, roughly
(28:43):
30,000 Japanese women migrated to the United States, most of
them for marriages to 1st generation immigrants who had
come over previously. But then there are several laws
passed in 1913 and 1920 that prohibited these first
generation Japanese immigrants from owning property.
So there's already a lot of thistension.
World War 2 breaks out and then,you know, 110,000 Japanese and
(29:06):
Japanese Americans were behind barbed wire or they were
remained for three years or more.
And then even for white Americans, you know, if any of
you have read Grapes of Wrath inhigh school, are familiar with
the idea of, you know, Okies wasthe pejorative term for people
from the greater Dust Bowl region, but especially those
from Oklahoma migrating to the state in pursuit of work.
(29:31):
Kevin Starr writes that during the Great Depression, California
was flooded with more than 300,000 agricultural workers.
Not Asians or Mexicans this time, but white Americans from
the Great Plains in the Southwest.
By the middle of 1934, there were 142 agricultural workers in
California for every 100 jobs. Wages plummeted by more than
50%. Indeed, my own family history
(29:56):
was one of people moving to California from Kansas farm and
not gone well. And during the Great Depression,
they sold and they were thankfully able to have enough
money to buy a small orange Grove in Southern California
where I was from, where my family then lived on my mom's
side. But that story was repeated by
hundreds of thousands of other people, money of whom were not
(30:17):
nearly as fortunate enough to beable to buy land.
And there's even stories of the LA sheriff at one point, which
is crazy that this was the LA County Sheriff putting up people
at the California border, turning them away if they didn't
have work guarantees. So trying to enforce Interstate
migration laws, which is very quickly thrown out by the
Supreme Court. But I bring up all these
stories, whether it's different minority groups, experience, or
(30:40):
even white Americans coming overfrom other states, not to try
and fixate on racial animosity or conflict, but instead to show
that throughout California's history, the California dream
has come in. Waves.
Waves were at. Peak with promises of prosperity
with open arms, welcoming in people from around the world,
from across the country and thengoing down into troughs during
(31:02):
times of challenges, during times of depressions when a
dream was no longer a reality and it did not pan out for the
people who sought it in the 30s,as with the rest of the country
really dicey times in Californiathere's the famous campaign of
Upton Sinclair. This some very quirky socialist
(31:23):
author who almost won the governor's race for California.
He would write these crazy, you know, long memos and these
pamphlets out to people He had like an almost I think it was
exclusively like fruit and veg vegetable diet.
He suffered a a nervous. Breakdown in between the primary
and the general election. He didn't win, but between
people like him and these other campaigns for more economic
(31:46):
security or these big labor versus capital conflicts where,
you know, unionized workers, whether it's the dock workers up
in San Francisco or the IWW and these other organizations
throughout the state, things were really intense and dicey at
this time. Now, maybe I'm doing a
disservice to the era of California history by focusing
on some of the the frothier and and more conflict laden themes.
(32:08):
But it's also important to note during this time, the California
dream gained this, this pillar of identity of, of being a place
of industry, being a place of industry.
So what I mean by that, it meansthat the California identity was
not just a place of, of gold rushes, but also a place where
there's work being done in diverse set of industries.
So so quoting Kevin Starr Between 19 O 7 and 1913,
(32:32):
agriculture and related activities, packing, shipping,
canning and food processing continued to offer seasonal and
regular employment, as did transportation and shipping via
2 railroads, 2 large streetcar companies and the 4th busiest
port in the nation. With home building constant
across 3 decades, there's an expanding job sector in the
building trades. The oil industry was producing
106 million barrels a year by 1920.
(32:53):
More tires were manufactured in greater Los Angeles than in any
place other than Akron, OH. More automobiles were being
assembled than in any city otherthan Detroit.
The hotel and tourist industry gained even further strength
along with two new economic sectors, aviation and motion
pictures. That was a very LA heavy
description, but I think it gives you a sense of of this
(33:14):
maturing region of it's not justgolden cattle and agriculture.
It's all these industries, right?
The the famous TV show that the Beverly hillbillies coming out
and shooting the ground and oil spouting up that that's what's
happening here, right? Oil created really the great
industrial infrastructure of Southern California.
It was the most productive oil bearing region at the time for
(33:34):
many years. And like it said, like Kevin
Starr said, aviation and movies as well, right?
If you've seen the the the movieThe Aviator with Leonardo
DiCaprio depicting Howard Hughes, the very eccentric
entrepreneur of the time who dabbled in both industries.
Southern California became the national epicenter of both movie
making and aviation, which aviation at the time was
(33:56):
arguably the most kind of exciting and forward thinking
industry. One of the future in California
would Southern California in particular would continue to
maintain dominance in the aerospace industry post World
War 2. But obviously the motion picture
industry and the idea of myth making, of creating these large
sets and movies and creating theculture that the rest of the
(34:19):
country would consume was added to the idea of the California
dream. OK, I've gone on enough tangents
now I need to keep myself on track.
We'll wrap up that chapter of 1900 to World War 2 and now
we'll turn to post World War 2 to roughly 2000.
So if I said before that 1900 toWorld War 2 was when California
was a teenager, when it's its features started to develop, but
(34:41):
they weren't fully it wasn't fully comfortable in its body
yet. It's still kind of limy and
gangly and still coming to gripswith who it was as a person.
This post war era is when California really steps into
maturity in the full blown adulthood.
So that included not only economic development, but also
population and kind of its its identity as being the center of
(35:03):
the the place where people went to experience the future of
America. So World War 2 was huge for
California in two ways. One was that it great it
stimulated the economy as California was the center of
aerospace and other defense industries.
And then two, it kicked off thismassive population boom of the
post war era that would persist up until, let's say the 90s.
(35:25):
So, quoting Kevin Starr, the federal government had spent
more than $35 billion in California during these war
years, and this in turn had multiplied the manufacturing
economy of the state by a factorof 2.5 and tripled the average
personal income. Approximately 1.6 million
Americans moved to California and millions of others had
(35:45):
received military training there, passed through or gone on
leave there before being shippedto the Pacific, sailing out
through the Golden Gate. Many of them had vowed to return
to California and make their lives in California if they
survived the conflict. Many kept their word and the
post war era represented a boom that would propel California
into becoming, by 1962, the mostpopulous state in the nation.
(36:13):
So it's impossible to overemphasize how important this
post war era is for California identity and for cementing
California. The California Dream has one of
a global hub. California is a global state
with two major global cities between San Francisco and Los
Angeles. This is when the California that
we know today fully came into the picture.
(36:38):
Later on writing, Kevin Starr writes again.
The public history of Californiabetween 1945 and 1960 is almost
exclusively driven by the saga of post war development.
No sooner in California welcomedand housed incoming veterans and
their families from the Cold Waror than the Cold War followed by
the Korean War broke out, the defense related economy of
California, which had been in the process of closing down in
(36:59):
the late 1940s, flared once again.
Los Angeles County alone found itself by the mid 1950s with
more than 40% of all aerospace contracts in the nation.
So the economy is humming. And it's not just Southern
California up north in Silicon Valley, where, you know, where
we think of almost exclusively today being software firms.
You know, it didn't come into into full fruition and
(37:21):
development until a few decades later.
But it's starting to pick up around this time.
And the defense industry propelsit as well.
Lockheed Martin, I believe, was the largest employer in Silicon
Valley up through the 80s, and alot of the development of
semiconductors and other, you know, hardware that was being
developed in the Valley at the time was for defense contractors
or for defense purposes. So this is when the economy
(37:48):
really boomed, when California was not just a place of where
people tinkered, but really where they built the future.
And at the same time, the lifestyle of Americans was
really reflected in California. Thinking about Southern
California in particular, this is when the suburban ideal of
the post war era was fully cemented into Americans minds.
(38:11):
We had the the first suburbs on the West Coast.
We also had some of the we had the first freeway in the nation.
And we would quickly expand thatmodel and boom across Southern
California and aggressively and quickly as possible to
accommodate all the new coming people, build out suburban
landscape that a lot of the restof the country would soon
imitate in the post war era. Kevin Starving talks about the
(38:32):
importance of Disneyland at thistime on the urban identity.
He says that in the case of Disneyland, a permanent
exposition and resort assured A newly suburbanizing generation
at the values of a more intimateAmerica.
Small town America may not be lost as was being feared in the
creation of the suburban developments of the post war
(38:53):
era. So it is just growth, growth,
growth is the theme of this timeand that became fused into what
the California Dream was. California was a place that
continued to boom, that continued to grow, and where
people from around the country would continue to come to get
their taste of the suburban lifeof the yard and a pool in the
backyard and a three bedroom, 2 bath ranch home somewhere in the
(39:15):
Southern California or San Francisco suburbs.
And as part of that growth, the California dream became fused
with this idea of upward mobility.
This is why things like education and higher education
were so important to Californians at this time.
Kevin Starr writes how taxpayerswere now willing to support the
University of California even though nearly 90% of them would
never see their children enrolled in AUC campus.
(39:36):
Thus, post war, California conceptualized its place as a
higher education utopia in whichall Californians would be
offered the opportunity to maximize their potential,
whatever their individual capacities and talents might be.
It was a vast and grand democratic plan and like the
schools, freeways and housing tracks everywhere under
construction in these years, it expressed the optimism of a
state that had gone to war and prevailed and would never be the
(39:58):
same. In later years.
The drama and energy of this period and its aftermath seemed
a golden age of consensus and achievement, a founding era in
which California fashioned and celebrated itself as an emergent
nation state. This is why Kevin Starr in his
book on this post war era titles, the book Golden Dreams
(40:20):
California in an Age of Abundance.
This was California's age of abundance when there is homes
and opportunities and good schools for children.
And that's what California represented to the rest of the
country. Now of course, that growth and
that explosion in that that sense of post war optimism would
not last forever. Kevin Star later writes that the
(40:40):
Consensus Party of California was being challenged by the
party of dissent talking about the 1960s and 70s.
Ever since the 19th century, dissent had been a way of life
for what many considered to be the left coast of the nation.
Such dissent was focused primarily on industrial and
labor related issues, but in thesecond-half of the 1900s
witnessed an explosion of descent into politics, feminism,
(41:02):
sexuality and other aspects of personal fulfillment, education,
literary and artistic value and practice, drug usage, military
service, and corporate culture and control that either
originated in California or consolidated itself here and
gave the state a reputation for kookiness.
Even as critics of California were themselves being
transformed by what was going onin the Golden State.
(41:23):
Thanks to upheavals in California, the rest of the
nation had by the 21st century become significantly Californian
eyes. So I use this quote to carry a
lot of weight. I'm not going to be able to
spend the time diving into all the nuances of the 60s and the
70s or of, you know, the descentacross a lot of different
issues. But that post war booming era
kind of set California on this path of growth, but it would not
(41:47):
last. And he talks about a lot of the
different social dimensions to that.
But another important dimension to that is the anti growth
movement that developed and gained steam in the 70s and 80s.
Pushing back against this sense that we were paving over
paradise, that we were growing too quickly in that California's
continued growth threatened the quality of life for the people
who were already here. If you listen to any of my other
(42:09):
episodes that with Nolan Gray orVirginia Postrel or Bill Fulton,
we talk a lot about the anti growth movement and its
implications for us as a state today, particularly around
housing. And it's that movement that
leads us to where we are today. The state has represented for so
many people, for so many generations.
For so long it has stood as the place of opportunity, of
(42:32):
transformation, of growth, of the place where you come and you
can take part in the future, where you can see it being built
and developed and that you yourself can have better
opportunity. But that is no longer true.
There's a lot of different statsyou can point to.
I don't want to bore you with a bunch of stats, but take for
(42:53):
instance the fact that California, when you adjust for
cost of living, leave the nationin in poverty rate, right?
Take the fact that California during COVID stopped growing for
the first time. I'll bring up a chart of
California's growth patterns over its history, the
California. And you can see it's incredible
growth post 1940, but it stoppedgrowing.
And it's funny because we live in this duality as a state where
(43:15):
we still are the place of innovation, right?
If you want to see the future inAmerica, you go to Silicon
Valley and you see what it lookslike.
But outside of the corporate hallways, the dream very much
feels broken, right? We're a state that historically
was able to build great works like the California Aqueduct or
the higher education system or the most advanced freeway system
(43:39):
in the nation, yet we can't build high speed rail.
Also, for a state that was defined by optimism in a sense
of, of opportunity about what the future could be, of
dynamism, that has largely faltered.
And a lot of Californians I speak to, particularly people my
age, I'm, I'm 31, it's, it's more so pessimism or cynicism,
(43:59):
you know, should I consider leaving the state or, you know,
moving inland or moving elsewhere so that I can afford
to live? This is especially true for the
working class. And you can see it on all the
demographic numbers around who leaves the state and who comes
in. We're experiencing this de facto
gentrification of the state justjust because of the fact that
the only people who move in are the people who are high income
(44:20):
earners who can afford to live in our absurd housing market,
not the people leaving predominantly.
And for this has been true for along time.
It's those who are are working class because working class
people who just cannot afford tolive in California anymore.
This this tension between the promise, the marketed version of
what the state is of this land of opportunity and the reality
(44:41):
on the ground right there's there's Kevin Starr.
When he's summarizing Joan Didion's writing, he says that
Didion more than implied that both her personal California in
terms of the myths she had observed as a child in the
larger California experiment contained what she believed to
be a crippling level of deceit and self deception.
(45:02):
And in some ways, California hadsomewhat lied to itself of
promising that we are the state of opportunity, of growth, but
that in making the promises of being the frontier of the the
frontier of the world, right being the frontier of America,
that we couldn't live up to the expectations that we laid for
ourselves. And here's this lengthy quote
(45:24):
I'm going to read from Kevin Starr.
Adjust the numbers so that they're more accurate for our
economy today. But he writes about this very
tension in his toward the end ofhis history, he says that
there's always been something slightly bipolar about
California. It was either utopia or
dystopia, a dream or a nightmare, a hope or a broken
promise, and too infrequently, anything in between.
(45:44):
In between a Society of great promise with a $4 trillion
economy making it the 4th largest on the planet, the world
was still rushing in, legally and illegally as it turns out.
Not to escape reality in California to bask in the
unearned increment, but to struggle competitively in a
society that had only begun to internalize in its internalize
the myth of itself. California was a promise, but is
(46:06):
also a struggle for redemption in the face of failure.
Later on, he writes, the common complaint that California was
that California had been hyped beyond recognition.
After all its media driven pretenses to glitz and glamour.
California was, all things considered, just another
American place, sometimes even worse than that.
So that's where we are today. Is California still spectacular?
(46:29):
Is it still a place of unique opportunity and upside?
Or is it just another American place, or maybe even worse than
that? That's the question Kevin Starr
leaves us with that I am constantly wrestling with and
that all Californians are havingto think about.
(46:51):
I don't have a clear prescription of what progress
looks like. I don't have a 5 point plan of
here's what we need to do as Californians to get back on
track. You know, we talked about this
in some of our different conversations and episodes, how
things like housing affordability, how other
cultural elements are critical for getting the state to back to
(47:14):
where it can be a place of dynamism once again, or even
more so than it is today. I think that fundamental
question of is California just another American place is the
one that we should be thinking about and asking ourselves and,
and, and questioning what do we want the state to be in the
future? Right?
Like I said, we lead the nation in poverty.
(47:35):
We, we have, we have all these challenges.
We're also going to be getting older as a state and as the rest
of the country. And I think about that a lot of
are we at a place and will we beat a place where we're willing
to invest in and sacrifice for the future of the state, even if
an increasing share of the state's population will not be
around to reap the rewards of that effort?
(47:56):
I personally root for dynamism. Maybe it's because I'm young,
but but even more so, it's because of I believe that the
world is better off when California is at its best, that
America is better off when California is at its best.
That many of our best ideas havecome from California, That our
sense of what the future can be is shaped by California and our
(48:17):
culture. And I think that there's
something fundamental, fundamentally good about having
a future that you believe in, that you and that you dream
about. I personally feel that when a
society stops believing that thefuture can be better than what
we have today, that society can become more 0 sum, it can become
(48:41):
more full of conflict. But rather that when you're
united in a vision of, of a brighter future of, of a better
tomorrow, that people are more willing and able to sacrifice
for the pursuit of the greater good.
So I don't have a super cheery note to end on, rather just
ending on this question that I've been wrestling with and,
and leaving it with you and, andasking what things that you
(49:03):
think about when you, when you think about this question of, of
what will define California's future?
Because I think more than anything, what's clear to me
after thinking about the state'shistory is that what got us here
today will not get us where we're hoping to go.
That this model of, of, you know, cheap land and booming
infrastructure and and growing industry, you know, it's, it's
(49:25):
not the days of easy growth are over in the state, but that does
not mean that the days of growthand opportunity are over.
I'll end on this. It's easy to bag on California,
to complain about California. But the truth is that even where
we are today in for all of the challenges that we face, we
still are the envy of the world that our companies, that our
(49:47):
industry that are dynamic, educated population, we are
still forward-looking people pushing the boundaries of what's
possible. And even if we are failing to
fully live up to our ideals as astate, we still have the core
pillars of a society that that believes that tomorrow can be
(50:09):
better. We are a place that still
dreams. And so even if we've fallen
short of our ideals, I think that still gives me a lot of
hope. So anyways, I realize I feel
like I'm getting really preachy here at the end.
I feel like I'm just kind of shooting from the hip on a lot
of different things that have have been on my chest or things
that I'm thinking about as I, I,I read my book.
So I'm going to wrap up to spareyou and to save myself before
(50:32):
jumping off the deep end here. But I really enjoyed this.
I, I really enjoyed talking about where the state has gone
and where it can go, because that, that breathes a lot of
life into my spirit. And I think it we, like I said
at the very beginning, we need an evolution, a new picture of
the California dream. And the first step to doing that
(50:54):
is just to acknowledging that where we are, where we're
falling short, and what we hope for from the future.
So my goal with this podcast, with everything that I do is to
infuse a, a, a, a sense of possibility into how you all
think about California. So thank you for listening, as
always, I love to hear your thoughts.
This is a very different episode.
(51:15):
It's somewhat personal. It's somewhat long, winding and
meandering of me digging into some of these historical things.
And like I said, I left a lot onthe table.
So if there's ever specific erasof California history that you
find interesting that you'd wantme to dig into and in greater
detail and to think about their implications for the future of
the state, I'd love to do that. I try and spare getting too
(51:35):
historical on too many things, but I will leave you with that.
And here's to California's future.
(52:38):
Music. The.
California, from its origin as an American state, was premised
on this notion of a gold rush ofinstant transformation, of
opportunity, of if I can go to this place, my life might be
better off. You see this?
Period of utopian settlements ofnew agricultural communities
almost. This has startup society energy
and says California had long since become one of the prisms
(00:22):
through which the American people, for better and for
worse, could glimpse their future.
Hello everyone, and welcome backto the California Future through
Society podcast. This week I have an episode that
I've been chewing on for a long time now, and it's the evolution
of the California dream. This is something I've been
thinking about because selfishly, for my own life, my
(00:43):
own thinking, my own writing, myown work, I've been wanting to
have a better understanding of where the state is going.
And I don't think I'm alone. I think a lot of Californians
feel this way. They feel a sense of of loss or
uncertainty or. Maybe the best way to put it is
that the. Story and the narrative that we
tell ourselves about the state no longer rings true for a lot
(01:04):
of people. We'll get into.
That of why that is, and what pieces are perhaps most out of
sync with reality. But I think.
Anytime you're in a situation where the narrative you tell
yourself about, whether it's yourself or your family or your
career or the place you live in or your city, or in this case,
your state, no longer rings true, you're forced to come up
(01:26):
with a new narrative, to come upwith a new story and a new sense
of direction and purpose about who you are and where you're
heading. We'll get into some of the more
specifics throughout this episode.
My goal is to go through the history of the state as concise
as possible and have an understanding of what the dream
(01:46):
has looked like through California's evolution so that
by the end, you know, we can have at least some semblance of
a of a foundation to think about.
Where is the state heading? What is the future of the state
going to look like? And what does it take to get
Californians dreaming again? Obviously, this is a massive
topic. This is something that feels a
(02:07):
little bit crazy trying to bite this off all in one episode.
So you'll have to let me know how you feel like I did at the
end. There's going to be entire
chapters and sections of the state that just get completely
left out. And that's just the way it is.
If you, unless you wanted me to sit here and record for, you
know, 12 hours, like I'm Dan Carlin covering all the
intricacies in his hardcore history episodes of, you know, a
certain war campaign. It's it's too much.
(02:31):
So it's a massive topic. So in order to try and cover as
concisely as possible in a single episode, I, I lean on my
friend Kevin Starr, which if you're watching the video, you
can see me holding up his book series on the California dream.
You can see there's eight books here.
It's over 3000 pages in total. And it's all based around
(02:53):
California history, different chapters of the state's history,
united by this idea of the California dream being the
central kind of narrative feature, narrative structure for
understanding what the state is and where it's going.
Just a quick read of some of histitles.
Are, you know, material dreams, Inventing the dream, Endangered
dreams, golden dreams and battledreams.
The dream endures California on the edge, Coast of dreams.
(03:16):
Set those down. So I've read all those books.
They're incredible. If you care about California
history and you want to understand the state better, by
far and away Kevin Starr is a place to start.
He was a 7th generation Californian born in 1940.
He. Pretty much spent his entire
life, his entire career chronicling in California,
understanding the state and documenting it, which I think is
(03:38):
really cool. Just regardless of the topic to
anyone has for anyone who has a a degree of focus and passion
about a specific thing to then spend their entire life
dedicated to understanding it more.
I think there's a lot of beauty in a life lived.
That way. And he's really good at blending
not just the economic and political analysis, but also
(04:00):
some of these cultural ideas. He's really into cultural
history. And like I said, he talks about
the dream and how it evolves through history.
So my goal is to the extent possible and for my own
purposes, I'm not trying to givea one for one breakdown of
here's how Kevin Starr thinks about the where we are today in
California. He's he's passed away, but it
(04:21):
his books are far and away the best resources for understanding
California. So I'm going to lean on them
heavily and I'm going to quote him specifically or specifically
I'm going to quote from this book California History, which
was his shorter version, kind ofsingle volume, 300 page book
summarizing state history. If I quote from him, that's the
book I'm quoting from, which by just as a side note, if any of
(04:43):
you care about California history, you want a single
volume place to start. And biting off 3000 pages of
cross eight books sounds intimidating.
That California History by KevinStarr is far and away the best
single volume history of California that I've ever come
across. OK, so the way I'm going to
structure this episode is by going through with painting with
(05:03):
a really broad but brush, think through the major chapters of
states, the state's history, andthen ending on just a
conversation about where California is today and the
reason I think this matters. Just as a.
Starting point is by recognizingthat the California Dream is
bigger than just California. I'm going to say that again, The
(05:25):
California Dream is bigger than just California.
So what do I mean by that? Well, there's a famous quote
from Wallace Stegner saying thatCalifornia is like the rest of
the United States, only more so.California is like the rest of
the United States, only more so,meaning that California is this
concentrated dose of the American identity that
(05:46):
California strengths and its weaknesses embody the American
ideals, the American personality.
And so, you know, while I come at this conversation and about
thinking about the California dream, specifically concerned
about the state and the state's trajectory, I think it's
important to know that in tryingto understand California better,
(06:06):
you understand America better. And there's a quote from Kevin
Starr in. That book that he talks about?
How California remains an American place perhaps the most
American of American places prophesying the growing
diversity of the United States and.
Dot dot dot, he said and says. California had long since become
one of the prisms through which the American people, for better
and for worse, could glimpse their future.
(06:32):
A friend of mine. A former professor of mine.
She. Once travelled to East Asia,
stopped in cities like Singaporeor Hong Kong and Shanghai, and
she came back and she said, I feel like I've seen the future,
right? These are some of the the latest
and greatest cities with clean, modern, exciting infrastructure,
LED lights all across the sky, she said.
It felt like I was I was in the future and what seeing what
(06:54):
cities around the world could look like down the road.
For most of California's history, California has been
that place where people arrived and they came to and they said
I've seen the future. Or if you were an American or
from anywhere around the world and you're wanting to seek
opportunity, you wanting to seekout what the future could look
like, California was the place that you came.
(07:15):
To see it, I think it's a good place to start as a foundation.
And then, like I said, we're going to go through history.
So to start, we're going to talkthrough this first period.
Right the calling it the the thedream is born 1850 to roughly
1900 or so and why 1850 right 1849 that is the gold rush that
is when California surges in to its American identities
(07:36):
relatively soon after the Mexican American war where
California becomes American territory American land rather
and then it becomes a state veryquickly Kevin Starr writes the
very acceleration of California into an American Commonwealth
had been the result of a gold rush with.
All that such beginnings implied.
(07:59):
For the perception of Californiaas a place where note this part,
where human beings might breakthrough the constraints of
day-to-day life and come into possession of something
immeasurably better, right. California from its origin as an
American state was premised on this notion of a gold rush,
(08:20):
premised on this notion of of instant transformation, of
opportunity, of if I can go to this place, my life might be
better off, even if it's just a purely material sense of I might
be able to strike gold in these early days.
So from the very beginning, California clicks and into the
American imagination, it shows up on the scene as this place of
(08:43):
instant transformation and opportunity.
And another quote just to give you a sense of the pace of how
quickly things transformed in California following the Gold
rush. Within the following two years,
the Gold Rush fast forwarded California into what historian
Hubert Bancroft would later describe as a rapid monstrosity
maturity. By 1849, the non-native American
(09:06):
population of California was approaching 100,000 people, up
from less than 10,000 people just the year before.
Even more astonishingly, California had organized itself
as a state bypassing territorialstatus, and it held elections
and was petitioning Congress foradmission into the union.
Within three years of President Pope's announcement, the
non-native American population had soared to 255,000 people and
(09:30):
a new metropolis, San Francisco,had sprung into existence like
Atlantis rising from the sea just a few decades later.
Kevin Starr writes that by 1870,San Francisco, with a population
of over 149,000 people, was the 10th largest city in the United
States, a remarkable developmentfor a city that did not formally
(09:51):
exist in 1846. So California shows up out of
nowhere and it bypasses territorial status like they
know because so many people surge in and it becomes a state,
even though the surrounding landin the American West was not yet
achieved statehood. That's what leads to what some
historians call the idea of one historical book on California
(10:15):
that I love. It's titled California, an
Island in the Land, right? California is developing in
relative isolation. And it comes, it arrives with
this air of, of, of mystery and excitement for the American
people. Kevin Starr, when he's talking
about the land itself, he talks about California was a kind of
island sealed off by the Pacific, the Sierra Nevada, the
Klamath and Cascade Ranges in the north and the Mojave Desert
(10:37):
in the southeast. Our natural landscapes and our
intense natural beauty somewhat shielded the state from the rest
of the country. So California is this far off
mythical place. And like I said at the very
beginning, the dream of California was one of risk and
reward. So gold rush.
(10:58):
Is not for everyone. If you're established, if you
are someone who has a well established life on the East
Coast, you're not going to uproot and take a boat ride
across the country to try and get to California to see gold.
Who seeks gold? It's the opportunists.
It's the strivers. It's.
(11:19):
The people who feel like they'vebeen left out are in have a high
risk tolerance and are in seek in pursuit of a better life.
Kevin Starr writes about this. He calls it a rush, a mass
migration of mainly younger men and some of middle age from all
corners of the earth, including China and Australia, who
ventured everything, their livesincluded as one in 12 would die
(11:40):
in the process on the gamble that they could strike it rich
and thereby break to a better life.
Such a hope, such a psychology of expectation, fused the
American or the Californian experience irretrievably onto a
dream of better days, of a sudden, almost magical
transformation of the ordinary. So these are the people who are
showing up to California early on, and that shapes the state
(12:04):
and the expectations that peoplehave of the state.
I don't have time to go into allthe details, but the, yeah, it
was horrifically violent. The murder rate, and it wasn't
just for the people who came here, is also for the native
population. There's a whole story there,
roughly one out of I think it was I was reading what 1/3 of
the native population was estimated upon.
Columbus's rival lived in the California broader California
(12:27):
area and native population is nearly extinct by 1870.
Now a lot of that happened underthe Spanish system, the Spanish
mission era before that, but it was also accelerated during this
time, even though a lot of the deaths that already happened
during this gold rush era. This.
This like I said. For better and for worse, this
American impulse to control the land.
And so again, I don't have time to go into that.
(12:48):
But in addition to the gold rush, I think another core
pillar up to the California dream at this time was one of an
experimentation and a relative blank slate, right?
California is this massive land.A lot of it was not inhabited to
have after, you know, 90% of thenative population had died by
something like 1850 or somethinglike that.
(13:10):
Until you see this time period of utopian settlements of new
agricultural communities, almostthis kind of startup society
energy happening where people from across the country, from
across the world show up and saywe're going to start a new city,
we're going to start a new town,we're going to start a new
community. A lot of them are affiliated
around different religious communities or social groups.
(13:32):
Some were secular or even just agricultural communities like
the hometown, My hometown Upland, which is was part of the
Ontario Water Colony project at the time.
George Chafee and his brother, they just said, hey, we can
figure out how to get water here.
And so anyone can come buy a little plot of land.
They buy into the water system and then they're able to grow
citrus and other produce and setup new life and I think.
(13:58):
That. That is also a core part of this
early part of California history, the California dream.
It's a place where you can experiment, where there's not an
existing social structure and you have to climb the existing
ladder, right? I, I use the phrase startup
society intentionally, right? People join startups because
(14:18):
startups represent opportunity not only for growth, but also
for greater responsibility than you might get in an existing
company, right? If when you're working at a
massive company corporation, youhave to climb the ladder, you
have to pay your dues. Even if you're a hotshot, if
you're in a massive firm like a Goldman Sachs or something like
that, you can climb the ladder quickly, but it still is going
to take some time. Versus if you're in a start up
(14:39):
and you show up and you're an incredible engineer from day
one, you can very quickly becomethe CTO, right?
You can be a 25 year old CTO when the CEO themself is only,
let's say 26 years old, right? There's more opportunity for
upward growth and beyond the gold rush, California continued
to develop through these booms and busts that promised people
(15:00):
opportunity and and and new waysof living, Kevin Starr writes.
Not for California. There would be, nor would there
ever be, as it turned out, a deliberate process of
development. California would rather.
Develop impetuously through booms of people and abrupt
releases of energy. These abrupt releases of energy,
(15:21):
new people showing up, new people hoping that there's new
opportunity. So that's I think the core, the
core pillar. If you can only take one thing
away from this early chapter of California, what is it?
It's this idea of this, this gold rush hope for the future of
the state. Now, I've hinted at in a few
ways, but there's also this fundamental question of the time
(15:43):
that continues to show up throughout the state and is
continuing. You know, it's still a
discussion today of who exactly gets to participate in the
dream, right? When a place offers opportunity
and it offers wealth and instanttransformation, everyone wants a
piece of that. And because of that, you then
get challenges, especially during the hard times of who
(16:05):
you. Allow to participate in the
dream. So we'll talk about more of this
later and how different, you know, racial minorities were
treated. But you can even see this in the
beginning, right when it's talking about the railroad.
Kevin Starr writes about how throughout its history, American
California has always imported its labor when necessary.
(16:27):
So specifically talking about the railroad, he says there is
not enough men in California willing to do this sort of back
breaking work at the price that the railroad owners were willing
to pay serving the labor pool ofCalifornia.
Crocker, the the person who's running the railroad could see
that there is thousands of Chinese in the state, most of
whom had for reasons of racial exclusion been marginalized out
of mainstream employment. He would eventually have some
(16:48):
10,000 in his employ and cumulatively over the next four
years that Chinese. Workers would achieve an epic of
construction second only to the Great Wall of China itself.
So I. Think this is important.
I'm not going to go into all thedetails about the railroad and
and the Chinese population there.
But we see in California historythis repeated pattern of of
opportunity of new people pursuing that opportunity and
(17:10):
people surging in to take part in the dream and then facing
some type of exclusion along theway as a result.
So here we see this intentional cultivation of Chinese labor.
Later on, there would be different laws prohibiting
Chinese immigration to the state.
We'll talk about this more in the 1930s.
But you saw whether it's different ethnic groups within
America or from around the world, people surging into
(17:30):
California seeking opportunity and and growth and then later
facing some type of restriction or some type of challenge.
And I raised this just because Ithink it's an important part.
Of the California Dream as well.We're in a moment in National
History, 2025. Of, you know, debates around
immigration and, and, and who isAmerican and, and what, what
does this look like? And I think these battles have
(17:54):
always been fought in California, first and foremost,
and you see that. So I just wanted to note that
we'll, we'll touch on that a little bit more later on.
So by the end of this chapter, right, wrapping up this early
chapter of roughly 1850 to roughly 1900, California has
this surge, this this influx of people and energy, but it's
still is largely empty. Around this time, kind of
(18:17):
started writing that California was for all practical purposes,
empty, larger than Great Britain, Holland, Belgium,
Denmark, and Greece combined. The state did not contain the
population. Of even a third ranked modern
city so. The California dream of this
time is still one of opportunityand excitement, but it still has
yet to evolve into the California that we would know
(18:38):
later on. So that moves us into then.
Part Two, 19102 Let's call it upto the World War Two 1940s, one
of a time of industry, imagination and infrastructure.
It's almost like a time of California kind of being like a
teenager. It's coming into its own.
It's starting to develop more traits and the California dream
is starting to take more shape, but it's still not yet fully
(19:01):
developed in the way that we know it today.
OK, so a checkpoint at this timein California's population.
Kevin Starr writes that at the 20th century dawn, the
population of California stood at roughly 1.5 million people,
quite a small figure for such a vast state.
Nearly half this population was living in the San Francisco Bay
(19:23):
Area with San Diego with a population slightly under 18,000
remaining. A venerable but inconsiderable
settlement in Los Angeles barelypassing the 100,000 person mark
across the next decade. The interurban electric Big Red
cars of the Pacific Electric Railway, incorporated in 19 O1
(19:43):
would connect the city of Angeles of Los Angeles.
To most of the cities and towns in the Los Angeles Plain,
transforming Los Angeles into the hub of Southern California
with a population of 319,000 by 1910, right?
It's almost tripling. Over a decade.
And in addition, not to leave out San Francisco, my friends up
north, there's another quote that's saying that by the early
1900s, San Francisco had a higher proportion of foreign
(20:06):
born residents relative to its total population than any other
city in the United States, including New York.
Anyways, OK, so at this point inCalifornia history, San
Francisco is established, the foundation has been laid, and
the city is this global hub thanks to the boom of the Gold
Rush and Southern California is starting.
To chug along, it's starting to catch up, but it still has a
(20:29):
long ways to go and the most notable part about this switch
from the pre 1900s to the early 1900s is that along the way in
the late 19th century California.
Builds the railroad. To the rest of the country, so.
What is the? California Dream at this time
(20:49):
it's this idea of boosterism, particularly in Southern
California, but it's boosters and being, you know these real
estate developers who are tryingto hype up the rest of the
country, convince them and persuade them through marketing
and advertising campaigns that you need to move to California
because this. Is where the opportunity is.
So this already was happening during the gold rush, but that
(21:11):
quickly fizzled out as the opportunity was taken.
And so the foundation of the California dream was already
laid, right? It's this place of opportunity.
It's this place where you can have instant transformation,
create wealth, seek out opportunity.
And now they pour gasoline onto that fire.
And they specifically target people who they think could come
(21:32):
and buy the land, primarily in Southern California but
elsewhere in the state as well, and get their slice.
Of the good life, there's this poster that'll pull up but I
love. From this era, it's very famous.
It's called California, the Cornucopia.
Of the world. Room for millions of immigrants
43,000,000 acres of government land.
(21:53):
Untaken railroad and private land for a million farmers.
A climate. For health and wealth free of
cyclones and blizzards. So you know these early
prototypical Mad Men type people.
Are trying to convince the rest of the country hey come out here
this is the time of. Of, of a great example of
boosterism is the Rose Parade, right, which was established in
(22:16):
the early 20th century. And the literal idea was that,
hey, while you're freezing in Buffalo or Rochester, you know,
anywhere on the East Coast, we're literally out here having
a parade with fresh flowers strolling our way down Pasadena
in January because our climate is so mild and lovely.
And again, this was happening throughout the state, but
(22:37):
Southern California really was the the heart of this
boosterism. And there's kind of two.
Pillars to this California dream, this California identity
that that was sold at this time and they still carry over
somewhat today. The first one is is one of its
Spanish roots. This is when kind of the
mythology around the Spanish roots took place.
Kevin Starr writes that the perception of Southern
(22:58):
California as an imagined Spanish place, shimmery and
romantic, function like a pseudohistory upon the region.
Anchoring it in a mythic time and place that manifested itself
in architecture. Place names for developing
townships, local festivals and later motion pictures and
popular song. So if you're in Southern
California, you know, there's somany cities have Spanish names,
(23:20):
Spanish identities. Certain cities like Santa
Barbara or other cities have thekind of distinct Spanish
architecture that wasn't there from day one.
In a lot of these places. A lot of it was kind of infused
or grafted on to the town and the area later on during this
period as part of this kind of celebration of this history, but
(23:41):
often a celebration of this history by people who would move
to California during this time. So I think that's interesting as
a Southern California. The other pillar in addition to
this kind of Spanish Mediterraneanism is, is 1 of
agriculture, right? The cornucopia of the world idea
is one that gets used a lot. And that's because at
California, agriculture was unique and was extensive and was
(24:03):
really effective. Kevin Starr writes that as far
as agriculture was agriculture was concerned, Northern
California witnessed the triumphof wheat in the 1870s and 80s
when it led the nation in wheat production.
And then thanks to the refrigerated railcar, California
produce could buy the 1890s reach Eastern markets within a
week. So that's by the early 1900s.
A veritable sea of citrus Groves, orange, lemon and
(24:23):
grapefruit ran from the interiorcounties of Riverside and San
Bernardino, where I'm from. Shout out into Los Angeles
headed for the coast and this LED.
To several famous brands, right?Brands like Sun Kissed.
It was kind of this cooperative of the orange growers in
Southern California created thisbrand to do the national
marketing before their produce. Or similarly, Sun made raisins,
(24:44):
which I feed my toddler. Seems like every other day we're
having some sun made raisins. The woman in the the field with
a bonnet harvesting raisins. So these are these are these
agricultural brands, the idea ofSouthern California and all of
California as this place of of agricultural wealth played into
this idea of it being a Mediterranean paradise, a place
(25:05):
of health and wealth. And other historians have talked
about the nature, how the natureof California's land and seasons
enabled it to have a lot of veryhighly specialized growing
seasons and specialized fruit and vegetables.
I think something like 2/3 of the nation's fruit and
vegetables come from California,a lot of it from the Central
Valley, because we have such a unique climate.
(25:28):
So there's two factors to that. One is what I just said, that we
could produce a large variety offruits and vegetables that
couldn't be produced on the restof the country and at a really
large scale. So it would become kind of this,
this bread basket of the nation.The second feature of that,
talking about this idea of needing to import labor, which
is what this other historian, Kerry McWilliams talks a lot
(25:48):
about, is that because you have these highly concentrated
growing seasons that sometimes are even, you know, down to just
a couple weeks all throughout the state, what resulted was
that you needed a highly mobile labor force of a lot of people
who could very quickly assemble in one place or another, which
then led. To some of the.
Workforce dynamics and labor dynamics around California farm
laborers that Cesar Chavez and others would would highlight
(26:11):
later on, but the foundation. For that was laid during this
period where you had a. Lot of these.
Agricultural seasons going on. So the California dream at this
time was that California is a place that anyone can build a
new life. And we had this incredible
explosive population growth during this time.
The population of California continued from, let's see, 2.3
million people in 1910. By 1930 were up to 5 million
(26:33):
people and then by 1940 were up to 6.9.
Now of course for. Anyone who knows American
history 1900 two World War 21940were not purely peaceful steady
times in America primarily because of the Great Depression
in the 1930s. And California was not immune
(26:53):
from the challenges of the GreatDepression.
And if anything, this Californiadream, this place of of
opportunity, welcoming millions of immigrants and people from
around the world between the Great Depression and then World
War 2, became a place where, youknow, open our arms and
subsequently close them to different people.
You know, just rattling off a few examples here.
You know, it's like the Mexican American population.
(27:15):
So between 1920 and 1930, Kevin Starr writes, the Mexican
American population in the city of Los Angeles, the single
largest minority group in the city, tripled from 33,000 to
97,000. And Los Angeles surpassed San
Antonio as the leading Mexican American community in the United
States. And it has a Mexican American
population larger than all but afew cities in Mexico.
(27:36):
Now, then during the 1930s, whenthe economy tanked and we were
in the Great Depression, there'sthis forcible repatriation of
Mexicans, including Mexican Americans, back to Mexico by the
federal government. And Kevin Starr describes this
as a program that can only be described as ethnic cleansing,
where estimates vary widely. But somewhere from 300,000 to 2
(27:57):
million people were repatriated.Roughly half of them were
actually American citizens. At a smaller scale, the African
American community at this time,it's known that it's, you know,
small is approximately 5000 people, but it's very
prosperous. Los Angeles had the highest rate
of homeownership of black Americans.
I think it was around 1930. But then there's a great book,
The Coveted West Side, that documents this in great detail.
(28:20):
But Los Angeles in California was not immune from things like
racial housing covenants and things like that that ended up
becoming a lot more restrictive about who could live where and
leading to a lot of racial animosity later on.
Obviously the Japanese American population due to internment
during World War 2, you know, things changed dramatically.
Kevin Starr talks about how between 1910 and 1924, roughly
(28:43):
30,000 Japanese women migrated to the United States, most of
them for marriages to 1st generation immigrants who had
come over previously. But then there are several laws
passed in 1913 and 1920 that prohibited these first
generation Japanese immigrants from owning property.
So there's already a lot of thistension.
World War 2 breaks out and then,you know, 110,000 Japanese and
(29:06):
Japanese Americans were behind barbed wire or they were
remained for three years or more.
And then even for white Americans, you know, if any of
you have read Grapes of Wrath inhigh school, are familiar with
the idea of, you know, Okies wasthe pejorative term for people
from the greater Dust Bowl region, but especially those
from Oklahoma migrating to the state in pursuit of work.
(29:31):
Kevin Starr writes that during the Great Depression, California
was flooded with more than 300,000 agricultural workers.
Not Asians or Mexicans this time, but white Americans from
the Great Plains in the Southwest.
By the middle of 1934, there were 142 agricultural workers in
California for every 100 jobs. Wages plummeted by more than
50%. Indeed, my own family history
(29:56):
was one of people moving to California from Kansas farm and
not gone well. And during the Great Depression,
they sold and they were thankfully able to have enough
money to buy a small orange Grove in Southern California
where I was from, where my family then lived on my mom's
side. But that story was repeated by
hundreds of thousands of other people, money of whom were not
(30:17):
nearly as fortunate enough to beable to buy land.
And there's even stories of the LA sheriff at one point, which
is crazy that this was the LA County Sheriff putting up people
at the California border, turning them away if they didn't
have work guarantees. So trying to enforce Interstate
migration laws, which is very quickly thrown out by the
Supreme Court. But I bring up all these
stories, whether it's different minority groups, experience, or
(30:40):
even white Americans coming overfrom other states, not to try
and fixate on racial animosity or conflict, but instead to show
that throughout California's history, the California dream
has come in. Waves.
Waves were at. Peak with promises of prosperity
with open arms, welcoming in people from around the world,
from across the country and thengoing down into troughs during
(31:02):
times of challenges, during times of depressions when a
dream was no longer a reality and it did not pan out for the
people who sought it in the 30s,as with the rest of the country
really dicey times in Californiathere's the famous campaign of
Upton Sinclair. This some very quirky socialist
(31:23):
author who almost won the governor's race for California.
He would write these crazy, you know, long memos and these
pamphlets out to people He had like an almost I think it was
exclusively like fruit and veg vegetable diet.
He suffered a a nervous. Breakdown in between the primary
and the general election. He didn't win, but between
people like him and these other campaigns for more economic
(31:46):
security or these big labor versus capital conflicts where,
you know, unionized workers, whether it's the dock workers up
in San Francisco or the IWW and these other organizations
throughout the state, things were really intense and dicey at
this time. Now, maybe I'm doing a
disservice to the era of California history by focusing
on some of the the frothier and and more conflict laden themes.
(32:08):
But it's also important to note during this time, the California
dream gained this, this pillar of identity of, of being a place
of industry, being a place of industry.
So what I mean by that, it meansthat the California identity was
not just a place of, of gold rushes, but also a place where
there's work being done in diverse set of industries.
So so quoting Kevin Starr Between 19 O 7 and 1913,
(32:32):
agriculture and related activities, packing, shipping,
canning and food processing continued to offer seasonal and
regular employment, as did transportation and shipping via
2 railroads, 2 large streetcar companies and the 4th busiest
port in the nation. With home building constant
across 3 decades, there's an expanding job sector in the
building trades. The oil industry was producing
106 million barrels a year by 1920.
(32:53):
More tires were manufactured in greater Los Angeles than in any
place other than Akron, OH. More automobiles were being
assembled than in any city otherthan Detroit.
The hotel and tourist industry gained even further strength
along with two new economic sectors, aviation and motion
pictures. That was a very LA heavy
description, but I think it gives you a sense of of this
(33:14):
maturing region of it's not justgolden cattle and agriculture.
It's all these industries, right?
The the famous TV show that the Beverly hillbillies coming out
and shooting the ground and oil spouting up that that's what's
happening here, right? Oil created really the great
industrial infrastructure of Southern California.
It was the most productive oil bearing region at the time for
(33:34):
many years. And like it said, like Kevin
Starr said, aviation and movies as well, right?
If you've seen the the the movieThe Aviator with Leonardo
DiCaprio depicting Howard Hughes, the very eccentric
entrepreneur of the time who dabbled in both industries.
Southern California became the national epicenter of both movie
making and aviation, which aviation at the time was
(33:56):
arguably the most kind of exciting and forward thinking
industry. One of the future in California
would Southern California in particular would continue to
maintain dominance in the aerospace industry post World
War 2. But obviously the motion picture
industry and the idea of myth making, of creating these large
sets and movies and creating theculture that the rest of the
(34:19):
country would consume was added to the idea of the California
dream. OK, I've gone on enough tangents
now I need to keep myself on track.
We'll wrap up that chapter of 1900 to World War 2 and now
we'll turn to post World War 2 to roughly 2000.
So if I said before that 1900 toWorld War 2 was when California
was a teenager, when it's its features started to develop, but
(34:41):
they weren't fully it wasn't fully comfortable in its body
yet. It's still kind of limy and
gangly and still coming to gripswith who it was as a person.
This post war era is when California really steps into
maturity in the full blown adulthood.
So that included not only economic development, but also
population and kind of its its identity as being the center of
(35:03):
the the place where people went to experience the future of
America. So World War 2 was huge for
California in two ways. One was that it great it
stimulated the economy as California was the center of
aerospace and other defense industries.
And then two, it kicked off thismassive population boom of the
post war era that would persist up until, let's say the 90s.
(35:25):
So, quoting Kevin Starr, the federal government had spent
more than $35 billion in California during these war
years, and this in turn had multiplied the manufacturing
economy of the state by a factorof 2.5 and tripled the average
personal income. Approximately 1.6 million
Americans moved to California and millions of others had
(35:45):
received military training there, passed through or gone on
leave there before being shippedto the Pacific, sailing out
through the Golden Gate. Many of them had vowed to return
to California and make their lives in California if they
survived the conflict. Many kept their word and the
post war era represented a boom that would propel California
into becoming, by 1962, the mostpopulous state in the nation.
(36:13):
So it's impossible to overemphasize how important this
post war era is for California identity and for cementing
California. The California Dream has one of
a global hub. California is a global state
with two major global cities between San Francisco and Los
Angeles. This is when the California that
we know today fully came into the picture.
(36:38):
Later on writing, Kevin Starr writes again.
The public history of Californiabetween 1945 and 1960 is almost
exclusively driven by the saga of post war development.
No sooner in California welcomedand housed incoming veterans and
their families from the Cold Waror than the Cold War followed by
the Korean War broke out, the defense related economy of
California, which had been in the process of closing down in
(36:59):
the late 1940s, flared once again.
Los Angeles County alone found itself by the mid 1950s with
more than 40% of all aerospace contracts in the nation.
So the economy is humming. And it's not just Southern
California up north in Silicon Valley, where, you know, where
we think of almost exclusively today being software firms.
You know, it didn't come into into full fruition and
(37:21):
development until a few decades later.
But it's starting to pick up around this time.
And the defense industry propelsit as well.
Lockheed Martin, I believe, was the largest employer in Silicon
Valley up through the 80s, and alot of the development of
semiconductors and other, you know, hardware that was being
developed in the Valley at the time was for defense contractors
or for defense purposes. So this is when the economy
(37:48):
really boomed, when California was not just a place of where
people tinkered, but really where they built the future.
And at the same time, the lifestyle of Americans was
really reflected in California. Thinking about Southern
California in particular, this is when the suburban ideal of
the post war era was fully cemented into Americans minds.
(38:11):
We had the the first suburbs on the West Coast.
We also had some of the we had the first freeway in the nation.
And we would quickly expand thatmodel and boom across Southern
California and aggressively and quickly as possible to
accommodate all the new coming people, build out suburban
landscape that a lot of the restof the country would soon
imitate in the post war era. Kevin Starving talks about the
(38:32):
importance of Disneyland at thistime on the urban identity.
He says that in the case of Disneyland, a permanent
exposition and resort assured A newly suburbanizing generation
at the values of a more intimateAmerica.
Small town America may not be lost as was being feared in the
creation of the suburban developments of the post war
(38:53):
era. So it is just growth, growth,
growth is the theme of this timeand that became fused into what
the California Dream was. California was a place that
continued to boom, that continued to grow, and where
people from around the country would continue to come to get
their taste of the suburban lifeof the yard and a pool in the
backyard and a three bedroom, 2 bath ranch home somewhere in the
(39:15):
Southern California or San Francisco suburbs.
And as part of that growth, the California dream became fused
with this idea of upward mobility.
This is why things like education and higher education
were so important to Californians at this time.
Kevin Starr writes how taxpayerswere now willing to support the
University of California even though nearly 90% of them would
never see their children enrolled in AUC campus.
(39:36):
Thus, post war, California conceptualized its place as a
higher education utopia in whichall Californians would be
offered the opportunity to maximize their potential,
whatever their individual capacities and talents might be.
It was a vast and grand democratic plan and like the
schools, freeways and housing tracks everywhere under
construction in these years, it expressed the optimism of a
state that had gone to war and prevailed and would never be the
(39:58):
same. In later years.
The drama and energy of this period and its aftermath seemed
a golden age of consensus and achievement, a founding era in
which California fashioned and celebrated itself as an emergent
nation state. This is why Kevin Starr in his
book on this post war era titles, the book Golden Dreams
(40:20):
California in an Age of Abundance.
This was California's age of abundance when there is homes
and opportunities and good schools for children.
And that's what California represented to the rest of the
country. Now of course, that growth and
that explosion in that that sense of post war optimism would
not last forever. Kevin Star later writes that the
(40:40):
Consensus Party of California was being challenged by the
party of dissent talking about the 1960s and 70s.
Ever since the 19th century, dissent had been a way of life
for what many considered to be the left coast of the nation.
Such dissent was focused primarily on industrial and
labor related issues, but in thesecond-half of the 1900s
witnessed an explosion of descent into politics, feminism,
(41:02):
sexuality and other aspects of personal fulfillment, education,
literary and artistic value and practice, drug usage, military
service, and corporate culture and control that either
originated in California or consolidated itself here and
gave the state a reputation for kookiness.
Even as critics of California were themselves being
transformed by what was going onin the Golden State.
(41:23):
Thanks to upheavals in California, the rest of the
nation had by the 21st century become significantly Californian
eyes. So I use this quote to carry a
lot of weight. I'm not going to be able to
spend the time diving into all the nuances of the 60s and the
70s or of, you know, the descentacross a lot of different
issues. But that post war booming era
kind of set California on this path of growth, but it would not
(41:47):
last. And he talks about a lot of the
different social dimensions to that.
But another important dimension to that is the anti growth
movement that developed and gained steam in the 70s and 80s.
Pushing back against this sense that we were paving over
paradise, that we were growing too quickly in that California's
continued growth threatened the quality of life for the people
who were already here. If you listen to any of my other
(42:09):
episodes that with Nolan Gray orVirginia Postrel or Bill Fulton,
we talk a lot about the anti growth movement and its
implications for us as a state today, particularly around
housing. And it's that movement that
leads us to where we are today. The state has represented for so
many people, for so many generations.
For so long it has stood as the place of opportunity, of
(42:32):
transformation, of growth, of the place where you come and you
can take part in the future, where you can see it being built
and developed and that you yourself can have better
opportunity. But that is no longer true.
There's a lot of different statsyou can point to.
I don't want to bore you with a bunch of stats, but take for
(42:53):
instance the fact that California, when you adjust for
cost of living, leave the nationin in poverty rate, right?
Take the fact that California during COVID stopped growing for
the first time. I'll bring up a chart of
California's growth patterns over its history, the
California. And you can see it's incredible
growth post 1940, but it stoppedgrowing.
And it's funny because we live in this duality as a state where
(43:15):
we still are the place of innovation, right?
If you want to see the future inAmerica, you go to Silicon
Valley and you see what it lookslike.
But outside of the corporate hallways, the dream very much
feels broken, right? We're a state that historically
was able to build great works like the California Aqueduct or
the higher education system or the most advanced freeway system
(43:39):
in the nation, yet we can't build high speed rail.
Also, for a state that was defined by optimism in a sense
of, of opportunity about what the future could be, of
dynamism, that has largely faltered.
And a lot of Californians I speak to, particularly people my
age, I'm, I'm 31, it's, it's more so pessimism or cynicism,
(43:59):
you know, should I consider leaving the state or, you know,
moving inland or moving elsewhere so that I can afford
to live? This is especially true for the
working class. And you can see it on all the
demographic numbers around who leaves the state and who comes
in. We're experiencing this de facto
gentrification of the state justjust because of the fact that
the only people who move in are the people who are high income
(44:20):
earners who can afford to live in our absurd housing market,
not the people leaving predominantly.
And for this has been true for along time.
It's those who are are working class because working class
people who just cannot afford tolive in California anymore.
This this tension between the promise, the marketed version of
what the state is of this land of opportunity and the reality
(44:41):
on the ground right there's there's Kevin Starr.
When he's summarizing Joan Didion's writing, he says that
Didion more than implied that both her personal California in
terms of the myths she had observed as a child in the
larger California experiment contained what she believed to
be a crippling level of deceit and self deception.
(45:02):
And in some ways, California hadsomewhat lied to itself of
promising that we are the state of opportunity, of growth, but
that in making the promises of being the frontier of the the
frontier of the world, right being the frontier of America,
that we couldn't live up to the expectations that we laid for
ourselves. And here's this lengthy quote
(45:24):
I'm going to read from Kevin Starr.
Adjust the numbers so that they're more accurate for our
economy today. But he writes about this very
tension in his toward the end ofhis history, he says that
there's always been something slightly bipolar about
California. It was either utopia or
dystopia, a dream or a nightmare, a hope or a broken
promise, and too infrequently, anything in between.
(45:44):
In between a Society of great promise with a $4 trillion
economy making it the 4th largest on the planet, the world
was still rushing in, legally and illegally as it turns out.
Not to escape reality in California to bask in the
unearned increment, but to struggle competitively in a
society that had only begun to internalize in its internalize
the myth of itself. California was a promise, but is
(46:06):
also a struggle for redemption in the face of failure.
Later on, he writes, the common complaint that California was
that California had been hyped beyond recognition.
After all its media driven pretenses to glitz and glamour.
California was, all things considered, just another
American place, sometimes even worse than that.
So that's where we are today. Is California still spectacular?
(46:29):
Is it still a place of unique opportunity and upside?
Or is it just another American place, or maybe even worse than
that? That's the question Kevin Starr
leaves us with that I am constantly wrestling with and
that all Californians are havingto think about.
(46:51):
I don't have a clear prescription of what progress
looks like. I don't have a 5 point plan of
here's what we need to do as Californians to get back on
track. You know, we talked about this
in some of our different conversations and episodes, how
things like housing affordability, how other
cultural elements are critical for getting the state to back to
(47:14):
where it can be a place of dynamism once again, or even
more so than it is today. I think that fundamental
question of is California just another American place is the
one that we should be thinking about and asking ourselves and,
and, and questioning what do we want the state to be in the
future? Right?
Like I said, we lead the nation in poverty.
(47:35):
We, we have, we have all these challenges.
We're also going to be getting older as a state and as the rest
of the country. And I think about that a lot of
are we at a place and will we beat a place where we're willing
to invest in and sacrifice for the future of the state, even if
an increasing share of the state's population will not be
around to reap the rewards of that effort?
(47:56):
I personally root for dynamism. Maybe it's because I'm young,
but but even more so, it's because of I believe that the
world is better off when California is at its best, that
America is better off when California is at its best.
That many of our best ideas havecome from California, That our
sense of what the future can be is shaped by California and our
(48:17):
culture. And I think that there's
something fundamental, fundamentally good about having
a future that you believe in, that you and that you dream
about. I personally feel that when a
society stops believing that thefuture can be better than what
we have today, that society can become more 0 sum, it can become
(48:41):
more full of conflict. But rather that when you're
united in a vision of, of a brighter future of, of a better
tomorrow, that people are more willing and able to sacrifice
for the pursuit of the greater good.
So I don't have a super cheery note to end on, rather just
ending on this question that I've been wrestling with and,
and leaving it with you and, andasking what things that you
(49:03):
think about when you, when you think about this question of, of
what will define California's future?
Because I think more than anything, what's clear to me
after thinking about the state'shistory is that what got us here
today will not get us where we're hoping to go.
That this model of, of, you know, cheap land and booming
infrastructure and and growing industry, you know, it's, it's
(49:25):
not the days of easy growth are over in the state, but that does
not mean that the days of growthand opportunity are over.
I'll end on this. It's easy to bag on California,
to complain about California. But the truth is that even where
we are today in for all of the challenges that we face, we
still are the envy of the world that our companies, that our
(49:47):
industry that are dynamic, educated population, we are
still forward-looking people pushing the boundaries of what's
possible. And even if we are failing to
fully live up to our ideals as astate, we still have the core
pillars of a society that that believes that tomorrow can be
(50:09):
better. We are a place that still
dreams. And so even if we've fallen
short of our ideals, I think that still gives me a lot of
hope. So anyways, I realize I feel
like I'm getting really preachy here at the end.
I feel like I'm just kind of shooting from the hip on a lot
of different things that have have been on my chest or things
that I'm thinking about as I, I,I read my book.
So I'm going to wrap up to spareyou and to save myself before
(50:32):
jumping off the deep end here. But I really enjoyed this.
I, I really enjoyed talking about where the state has gone
and where it can go, because that, that breathes a lot of
life into my spirit. And I think it we, like I said
at the very beginning, we need an evolution, a new picture of
the California dream. And the first step to doing that
(50:54):
is just to acknowledging that where we are, where we're
falling short, and what we hope for from the future.
So my goal with this podcast, with everything that I do is to
infuse a, a, a, a sense of possibility into how you all
think about California. So thank you for listening, as
always, I love to hear your thoughts.
This is a very different episode.
(51:15):
It's somewhat personal. It's somewhat long, winding and
meandering of me digging into some of these historical things.
And like I said, I left a lot onthe table.
So if there's ever specific erasof California history that you
find interesting that you'd wantme to dig into and in greater
detail and to think about their implications for the future of
the state, I'd love to do that. I try and spare getting too
(51:35):
historical on too many things, but I will leave you with that.
And here's to California's future.
(52:38):
Music. The.
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