The Rest Is History - 61. California

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

No state in America captures the imagination quite like California. With its glitz and glamour and also its enormous economic disparities the state is a symbol of both the American dream and nightmare. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland explore California’s origins as well as its modern day politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. well it's june the sun's out the surf's up and who wouldn't want to be gone for the summer surfing usa unfortunately here at the rest is history myself tom holland my partner dominic sandbrook we're stuck in england we're a long way from the surf and the golden beaches of California. But all the more reason, Dominic, I think, to do an episode on the history of this remarkable corner of the world and a place that you really love, don't you?

I do, actually. I know my persona on the rest of this history is sort of... A grump. ...commercially cynical. The Grinch. Yeah, the Grinch. But I do love California. When I get off the plane, I've been a few times,

and every time I sort of get, you know, it's that utter cliché, the sun shining and, you know, the sense of possibility and open horizon and all that sort of stuff. I mean, I absolutely am a sucker for all that. I think actually a lot of English people are, aren't they? In a way, because it's certainly within England, we project it to ourselves as the sort of absolute antithesis of the closed claustrophobic grumpy cynical world that we normally inhabit but i think for everybody i mean you know outside america but maybe even

within america as well in america yeah because it's the dream factory because you've got hollywood you've got tv and everything yeah to go to california even if you've never been there you kind of feel oh this is all very familiar yeah i think there's that if you have watched mad men and those of our listeners watch mad men he's in don draper the main character he's in his office in in you know manhattan and everything's going wrong and his personal life is a disaster and then every now and again he gets on the plane and he goes to california and he too he's the one man there in a suit and they're all sipping cocktails around paul's and you get a real sense of how even in the 50s that image of california is the sort of paradise as the

world where you shed all your earthly cares and you you know the kind of kingdom of heaven there you go tom there's a gift to you um but one i'm not going to pick up because the reputation of California is kind of a place almost where you go not just to escape he's speaking as an American, like a strange history-less place, drifting along without any grasp on its own past, curiously agnostic to its own sense of self. Well, that may be true, but you are actually very interested in the history of California, aren't you? And I'm imagining that you were going to say there's an awful lot of history. Yeah.

And actually, the weird thing is that that sense of being rootless and untethered by history is itself a historical construct. So that's kind of 20th century California, the suburban state, and the sense of it being plastic, as people have sort of entirely invented. And that's itself a product of history, but of course California does have a fascinating history, incredibly interesting. So do you know, Tom, where the name California comes from?

I've come prepared with a great uh i i think it comes from the name of a fairy princess in some spanish romance or something exactly so lady califia queen exactly something like that dead right so the the book is called the deeds of esplendian and it's uh by garci or donna's monteluo published in 1510 for very early very early supposed to be the most popular spanish romance before don quixote by Garci Ordonez de Monteluo, published in 1510. So very early. Yes, very early. Supposedly the most popular Spanish romance before Don Quixote. And there's a battle at Constantinople,

or there's something going on at Constantinople, and the Black Amazons arrive, and their leader is Queen Calafia. Yeah. And this idea of the sort of slightly, yeah, this idea of the being, it's slightly Eldorado-ish, this land of gold, this land of possibility. And when the Spaniards land in California, Bia California is now the Mexican bit in 1533, they name it after the story. So right at the beginning of California's history, there's legend and storytelling and all that stuff. I can push the history of California much further back than that.

Please do. Okay. So the first time I went to LA, landed there, went to a kind of brilliant James Elroy type hotel. And the first place that I wanted to visit was in La Brea, where they have tar pits and in prehistoric times mastodons dire wolves saber-toothed tigers would go to these tar pits and they would sink in and they're perfectly preserved and as a child I had a an American La Brea tar pit kit you put it together and there was kind of mastodon and everything and a smilodon which is actually the the californian fossil so all the state all the states in america have fossils which i think is brilliant i didn't know that yeah so so california's is smilodon the the saber-toothed tiger anyway i i this isn't an actual history show but the reason i mention it is that um there was one human who was found in these tar pits uh and she she seems to have lived about 7 000 bc something

like that so 9 000 years ago and she had a wound to her skull so she has been named as um possibly california's first known homicide victim it's such a theme of californian history isn't it sort of homicide investigations absolutely so we've talked about the surf and the sun and all the kind of upbeat stuff, but California is obviously famous for its serial killers and its dodgy cops and all that kind of stuff as well. So I'm sure we'll come on to that. Anyway, I just throw that out,

that perhaps we can trace the beginnings of California all the way back to 7,000 BC. Yeah, that's great. And actually, you know what, Tom? I mean, it's so interesting, isn't it, that people say, well, California's got no history. And you often hear that of America generally. People will say, particularly in the old world,

they'll say, well, America has no history. And, of course, that itself is what Americans wanted to believe, that they were starting anew, that they were leaving history behind them. And as those tar pits remind us, it does have a history. And actually, what's been written out of the history. So for example, you don't think of California typically as a place where a lot of Native Americans lived. But of course, they did. I think some historians think as perhaps a third of the entire Native American population lived in what is now roughly

California, which is a story that you don't often hear, because you hear all about the planes and stuff, but you don't hear about the Californian. So what's, what's the story of dispossession, which I guess is also the story of, of settlement. It's just, it's the Spanish.

It doesn't, it doesn't quite fit. No, because the Spanish, see what's really interesting is people start arriving in California in the 16th century. So Francis Drake is one of those people. Yes.

Francis Drake arrives at a point Reyes and they have a service using the one of those people. Yes, of course. Yes. Francis Drake arrives at Point Reyes, and they have a service using the Book of Common Prayer, the first ever Book of Common Prayer service in the Americas. So he arrives in the Golden Hind, and then he goes off again, and there's no real attempt to settle in California by the English. And the Spanish basically use California as a way station. So it's, you know, to think that we live in an age of globalization now, but their galleons are going from Manila in the Philippines to New Spain, Mexico, the Mexico City. And California is the place where they stop.

So they build kind of, they have a port, I think, at San Francisco, this huge bay. And later on in the 18th century, they established the famously missions, but they're done by the Jesuits. It's not the authorities in Mexico that's doing that. So it's kind of a privatized bit almost of New Spain, run by the Jesuits. And one of them who was leading the mission, his statue got toppled, I think, last year.

It got cancelled. Yeah, it got cancelled. So I guess that that's a kind of focusing the tension between the two narratives of European settlement as a process of bringing civilisation to the wilderness and the Native American perspective that this is a process of depredation and theft. Although I think actually, much as you might beat up

on the missionaries now. Obviously, I wouldn't. Well, no, you wouldn't. At that point, I think there has been an argument that there's a devastation through disease and all that stuff. But settlers haven't arrived in big numbers at that stage. So in the 16th, 17th, even a lot of the 18th century, there really aren't many people at all. California is a long way from Mexico and from Peru. So they're the places where most of the Spanish kind of conquistadors go.

It's obviously a colossally long way from the east coast of what's now the United States. So if you're arriving from England, you don't keep going and go all the way to California. And actually, for a long time, there were very, very few settler people. So up to the point where the Mexicans get independence from Spain, that what there is, there aren't towns. But it's really odd because it's such an amazing place.

Yeah, but so much of the Americas is so amazing. Why do you need to go to the furthest bit away? I was thinking about that. Why don't people settle it earlier? And the answer is surely obvious that, you know, at the point you arrive to, to escape the new world, you know, some people settle there. And then some people go on further.

So they start going to like what's now the Midwest in the United States, or they go to other bits of Mexico. But California is still hundreds of miles beyond that. Why would you keep going? But it's named after a beautiful medieval princess i mean what's not to like sort of and and there's i there's lots of there's lots of native americans that of course there's lots of resources but there's lots of resources everywhere why do you need to go on another thousand miles yeah i suppose so when so when

do when do english speakers start moving in i think not until the, I don't know, the gold rush. In a big way, not until the gold rush, 1848. I mean, there have been English speakers arriving. So Mexico gets independence

in 1821. So the Spanish Empire basically breaks up at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Mexico gets independence and you have this period where you've got a Mexican California,

but again, there's not many people there. And the American settlers arrive, so English speakers, and you get Russians arriving. So they built a place called Fort Ross. So that's the lowest bit of the sort of Russian expansion into the Americas that you've got in Alaska, so the southernmost point.

But they don't do it in a big way. And then the Americans sort of take it roughly at the same time they take Texas so the Mexican-American War at the end of the 1840s and what's interesting about that, Tom is that you've got all the action in Texas and stuff that people are familiar with

the Alamo and these sort of scenes you've got the Mexicans and you've got Native Americans and you've got American settlers. And there's this period of intense violence. But in California, it's much more small scale. I was only reading today a description of the moment when they're raising their famous kind of grizzly bear flag and claiming independence from the Mexicans. And it's talking about the great standoff. And basically, everybody in the state arrives.

They ride over the horizon. It's like 20 people or something. I mean, tiny, tiny numbers. I remember when I went to LA being very struck by the fact that apparently LA joined the union before the state of California was created. So kind of a few months before or something. Well, it's all a very shambolic process because it's being done by kind of, you know, these guys who are kind of free Because it's being done by kind of, you know,

these guys who are kind of freebooters. They're kind of operating independently. There's not, the main person is an officer, sort of Napoleon, he sees himself as a new Napoleon, he's called John Charles Fremont. Kit Carson is his chief scout, who was once a very famous figure in sort of Cowboys and Indians films. But they're, you know, they're quite small. It it's all quite small scale there's not that many people there so when la gets

incorporated as a municipality its population is i think 1600 yeah tiny so that tiny that counts as a metropolis in those i mean what's that like a not even a small town is it it's basically a village kind of village yeah so then i assume what swells it is the gold rush yeah and the gold rush is a gold rush is a great story but it's a terrible story as well so a man called sutter who basically does everything because there's so few people in california he seems to do everything in california in the 1840s he's building a sawmill in what's now sacramento on the sacramento river and one of his workers, a man called James Wilson Marshall, he's sort of faffing around in the stream,

and he finds these nuggets, shiny nuggets, and they fiddle with them for a bit, and he bangs them between rocks, and then he sees exactly that. Supposedly, he shouted, Eureka! But I don't think that's... Surely he shouted, Yeehaw! Yeah, that's ultimately very plausible. But the stats are astounding. So in 1848, do you know how many people were in California in the whole state?

No, not many. Fewer than 10,000. So yeah, I mean, tiny, smaller than the population of a market town in the whole state. And in three years, more than a quarter of a million people turn up. Under their own steam, right? Yeah. So it's all wagons and... Exactly that. There aren't trains at this point. in three years, more than a quarter of a million people turn up. Under their own steam, right? Yeah. So it's all wagons and... Exactly that.

There aren't trains at this point. It's wagons. It's arriving. I assume some are arriving by ship. San Francisco is sort of transformed into this huge port because it's exporting all the gold. They're young men. They're the 49ers.

Hence the San Francisco 49ers team. Do you know the most feared criminalsisco 49ers um team well do you know the the most feared criminals in the gold rush to california uh no but you clearly do i do uh they were apparently australian oh that doesn't surprise me at all the sydney ducks they were called and also a load of french people oh that's always a bad sign. Very, you know, unusual. Apparently 28,000 French speakers ended up in the gold rush. And I've been reading James Bell. I came across this quite coincidentally, not thinking I would be reading about California.

I'm reading James Bell, which is Replenishing the Earth, the Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World. And he is talking about the kind of the racial hierarchies in the gold rush. It's a very racist yeah it's an inclusively racist society he calls it but if you're in so you know you can be english irish scandinavian german you're treated as honorary americans everyone else isn't so that would obviously include native americans black americans mexicans but also apparently the french so the french were that's interesting

we're treated very very badly um but some of those people must be coming from quebec i suppose yeah so half of them i think were coming from quebec and half from uh from france proper but yeah there's an there's an astronomical murder rate during the gold you know you basically the way you know you you find a load of gold and then somebody kills you for it is how it works. And especially if you're Hispanic or you're Chinese or you're... Or French. Yeah, or French as you have discovered. And the fact that I think particularly,

basically a lot of the people who are pitching up have no experience in mining at all. So they don't know what they're doing. They just fancy some gold. And the people that they get to do a lot of the actual hard graft are people who have been doing mining

in South America. So they'reileans or peruvians and they do all the hard work and then they get killed and people take off yeah people take all their gold and also has it begun so it has continued i guess you could well you could say yeah this is the kind of there's always this thing with america with all american history isn't't there, of their original sin? And you could argue that there is an original, you know, because this is also the point at which the Indian population really plummets. So the Indians are just exterminated.

They're used as child labour. Consciously, consciously exterminated. Pretty consciously. Is this kind of conscious? They're used as slaves. They're just used as disposable cannon fodder to work in the mines. So after the Civil War? What are we talking? We're talking between 1840s and the 1880s or so.

Right. So effectively, they're being used as slaves even after slavery has been abolished. Well, I mean, you can argue. I mean, this is a huge question. You might well say the same about African-Americans, mightn't you? I mean, they are used abominably, I think it's fair to say. I mean, I don't say this as a terribly woke person myself, but the Indian population, I think, in 25 years fell from,

see, I'm very ready with the stats today, Tom. The Indian population fell from 150,000 to fewer than 30,000. So an astronomical decline. So, you know, when you go to California, now, you don't think of it as a place. The Indian, sort of Indian presence in California survives in a sort of new agey way, I suppose. But in every other respect,

it's almost been completely eradicated, hasn't it? Much as it has in, say, Argentina or somewhere. But you do, you have a continuing hispanic presence yeah yeah which is true to its history and so that's there and then you also get increasing numbers of people coming from europe of whom i guess the the most celebrated of those who help set up hollywood have i got that right yeah you've also but you have missed out the asians so the as Asian element is really important. Chinese and Japanese, actually.

So they come in the late 19th century, early 20th century, indentured labor and so on, Chinese. And they're helping to build railroads as well. Yeah. What is it, the Central Pacific or something like that? Yes, all that kind of stuff. It's huge railroads. I mean, we think of, I mean, gosh,

this is the great thing we do in California. When you're doing British history, you think of the age of the railways and this amazing story. And then you turn it to America and the sort of conquest of the West. And the canvas is just a thousand times larger. And they're building these massive railroads, you know, thousands and thousands of labourers. And kind of racing each other, aren't they? So people the east people going from the west exactly and people all the chinese labor is just being flogged to death again pretty

much and that transforms the state as well tom because what you have i mean i i love this because it's one of these details of these tiny insignificant i mean i used to sort of when i was writing books about brit Britain in the 50s, I'd basically travel the land talking to people about the invention of the washing machine and how important it was. And this is a similar level. So it's the invention of the refrigerated railroad car. And that transforms California because it becomes a massive farm

for the East Coast. So these colossal farms, I mean, just mind-bogglingly large to a European in the sort of interior of California, where all these sort of legions of sort of migrant workers are producing the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. And they're sticking them in the refrigerated cars and then off they go to the East Coast. I mean, that completely transforms the Californian economy. And also the image of California, I guess, because it's from that point on, it's seen as this kind of paradise full of plenty, which I guess runs to this day. So Sunkist, Sunmade, they're both Edwardian, what we would call Edwardian brands. And before that, they've invented jeans, haven't they? Yeah, in the gold rush. But also, I tell you what, i didn't um so there's a

brilliant historian of california he's one of the great historians called kevin starr and he's written this whole sequence of books about california sort of decade by decade almost um with dreams it was always in the title it's kind of in battle dreams the dream endures and so on one of the things he talks about is how at that moment, California becomes almost like a kind of grand tour destination. So you go there from the East Coast on the train, which you couldn't do before, and you go there for health reasons or for – it becomes a kind of Mediterranean of America, you know, health and blue skies.

And that's the point at which people start going to Southern California and you get this Spanish revival architecture and people build hotels. And Getty building fake Roman villas. Yeah, exactly. All of that stuff. It starts to become this fantasy world. Once you've got the railroad, you can bring people in. They're going on health retreats and all that stuff.

We should probably take a break. But before we do that, and you talk about dreams, you talk about fantasy, I think we should talk about the beginning of Hollywood, which in a way is why everybody across the world has California in their dreams

and their imaginings. So tell me about the beginnings of Hollywood. Why is the film industry where it is? The honest reason is so banal, you know, you'll be disappointed. It's the weather. That's, you know, living in England, I can totally accept that. So people start, I think they start going round about the 1910s or so in a big way to Hollywood.

And they go there, I think, well, there's two actually reasons. One is the weather and the other is to escape regulators. So if they were doing a lot of filming around sort of New York, New Jersey, but the sort of the body that was regulating the film industry and was basically, you know, checking up on them and charging them for this and that and the other, which was called The Trust, was based in New Jersey, and they just wanted to get away and they wanted to go somewhere as sunny

so they could build sets outside because they've got tons of space and they wanted weather. You know, if you're filming in with that equipment, sort of Edwardian era equipment and it rains, you know, you're buggered basically. Yeah.

So you need to guarantee good weather to do external filming and light of course. Yeah. So it's kind of perfect. They go there and then it becomes that classic thing, you know, critical mass. There's a momentum to go there. Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford

and Douglas Fairbanks and co pitch up there. And then suddenly it just becomes the place. The place to do it. And at that moment, at that precise moment, the European, rival European film industries are destroyed by the First World War. So they're not producing films in anything like the same numbers. And suddenly Hollywood is where it's happening.

And it becomes industrialised. They buy up all the cinemas and it becomes kind of, the industry is vertically integrated. And by the end of the 1920s, the idea of challenging Hollywood is unthinkable. I'm talking about Children's Hundreds question. Is California where history goes to die? I mean, it's also the building of ersatz history because as you say you can build huge

great sets out in the desert so they're still there aren't they all the kind of recreations of babylon and epics and things they're very famous they're yeah they're the great ones aren't they and actually this is jumping forward a little bit but that that's what Disneyland is. Disneyland is a perfect metaphor for 20th century California, because Disneyland is built, I mean, we are jumping ahead, but it's 1955. And you go in, and it's Main Street, USA. So it's an idealized vision of a small town America that even at that moment is disappearing. And then some of the lands, you know, it's Frontierland, which is the kind of American Western, this image of the conquest of the West, and Tomorrowland, which is an image of an idealised future.

And that, in a sense, is why Disneyland works so well as a kind of, as a symbol of California, because that's all that California is. It's an idealised America. It's got a kind of invented past, and it's got a kind of imagined future. That is a perfect note, I think, on which to have a word from our sponsors.

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If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are California Dreaming, and we're going to kick off the second half with a question from Nicholas Rogers AM, who asks, how much is the development of California and its major cities, especially Los Angeles, linked to water, irrigation, and the resulting politics? So Dominic, that's the stuff,

as is ever the case with California, both of hardcore political history and of Hollywood, isn't it? It is. It's Chinatown, isn't it? It's the story of the great film noir, Chinatown, 1974. Yes, so a lot of California is pretty arid. And basically the story, there's this colossal growth in the 20th century.

I mean, astronomical growth in population urbanization. And places like Los Angeles in particular, that's a city where there shouldn't really be a city because there's not enough water. So what they did, they have this huge big public project at the beginning of the 20th century to bring water through a series of dams and reservoirs and stuff to the city to

irrigate the land, basically so that they can turn it into this metropolis. And I think in LA's case, it's the Owens River that they divert and basically devastate. And yeah, there's tons of corruption, obviously, associated with these big projects. But it's an age that believes in, you know, it's an age when people believe

they have a right to sort of tame nature. I mean, that's part of the story of California. It's both a natural paradise and it is an object lesson in what humanity does to kind of unspoiled nature. So you have these amazing national parks and the Redwoods and, you know, Yosemite and Big Sur and these fantastic landscapes. But at the same time, you have L.A. I mean, I like L.A. and, you know, a lot of people hate it. I really like L.A., but it is kind of you know it's a it's a terribly

polluted it's a symbol of you know man's um abuse of the natural world isn't it it's it's also uh we talked about paris as as a cry as a city famous for its criminals with agnes parry but there's a sense i mean la as well, with London, I guess, is one of the great cities for crime. Yeah, because of Phil Norris. Yeah, Raymond Chandler. And then I guess James Elroy. Yeah, yes.

So in James Elroy's novels, he's always talking about the zoot suit riots. And I'm ashamed to say I've never actually, I've never actually looked up what a zoot suit is or what the zoot suit riots and yeah i'm ashamed to say i've never actually i've never actually looked up what a zoot suit is or what the zoot suit riots are um are you are you able to answer that for me i can answer it whether the listeners will um think i know anything about it is a different matter but i can give an answer uh so california goes into the um second world war quite troubled for obvious reasons.

It's very vulnerable to Japanese attack. And there are Japanese invasion scares, Japanese bombing scares all the time. Steven Spielberg's one big flop, 1941. 1941, yeah. And yeah, there was this very famous occasion when people thought they were being bombed by the Japanese or Japanese planes were attacking and they weren't. But, you know, there's tens of thousands of Japanese Americans in California. They all get put in camps, basically,

moved away from the coast. There's a real sense of kind of simmering tension. I think partly because California was one of the main bases for the US Navy. So there are tons of, at any given moment, there are tons of Navy servicemen, young men, but there are also lots of Mexican-Americans who are not in the Navy,

who are sort of wandering about in their zoot suits. And their zoot suits, for British listeners, they're sort of the American equivalent of Teddy Boys to an extent. So they're wearing these kind of extravagant... Glosses. Yeah, they're sort of Edwardian costumes, fancy hairdos. They're very dandy-ish.

And you can just imagine the scene. These guys are sort of swaggering down the street in what we might say is a classic kind of teenage young man way. But in the sort of racialised world of 1940s California, the US Navy guys and the Marinesines and stuff say oh who are these mexicans walking in their sort of swaggering way this is how mexicans behave it's very bad they're stealing our women blah blah blah blah and so you get these riots these um and that you know that sort of the level of violence is is disputed because of course as was the way

newspapers reported it um again in quite sort of of what you see as racialized ways. But there was a real worry. I mean, the U.S. sort of high command, that their troops would run out of control. They're basically roaming the streets, beating up Mexican streets. And interestingly, they strip them of their clothes, and particularly their trousers. It's this sort of sign that, you know,

they're obviously trying to emasculate them in some way. And it's a real, you know, there's this sort of sign, you know, they're obviously trying to emasculate them in some way. And it's a real, there's a lot of damage, there's a lot of I don't know the I don't know offhand the sort of the toll of injuries or deaths, but it is a I think nobody died actually. But I think it's a very

serious sort of insurrection. And so racial tensions are one of the themes particularly in LA, I guess. Yeah, I've always been. You get Watts in 1965, Rodney King, 92. But it's not always black and white. I mean, when I say black and white,

I mean African-Americans and sort of European-Americans. So a lot of it is to do with Hispanics or Japanese or Chinese. I mean, that's one of the things that makes California such a rich and interesting subject is the diverse. It is so diverse. Yeah. And now, obviously, is the sort of absolute, I mean, I don't want to say the melting box is such a cliche,

but it obviously feels, as a European visitor now, extraordinarily Hispanic in a way that some Americans have always found makes them anxious. So that's one theme. There's another one that's highlighted by Pat Roberts, which I know is right up your street. And how has California gone from the most Republican state, the home of Nixon and Reagan, to the most democratic? So now we nixon and reagan to the most democratic so now we would think of california as absolutely you know the essence of of democratic yeah maybe even further to the left yeah than the democrats but um you know as as pat says it it's it was the base of nixon it was the base of reagan it was the base of scharzenegger um yeah but they're all well

the the california was always very republican i think for reasons that would appeal to you tom given your own um much stated interests so it was a particular kind of christians actually that uh that went to california so nothing to do with dinosaurs they were no sadly all romans um so when cal California massively expanded, the people who went there, the majority of them, I guess, or at least a very large plurality, were white Protestants from the American Midwest. So actually Nixon is a very good example of this. So his dad, I think, came from Ohio, and they're Quakers.

So these guys go to California, and they are sort of sympathetic to a kind of evangelical religious tradition. So I don't know if you've ever been to it. There's an amazing building called the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles, which is a great symbol of this. It's a great shining glass, the world's largest glass building, an evangelical church. I mean, California is full of evangelical churches.

So these guys all went. And that tradition was very Republican. So white, Protestant, middle class, that was the bedrock of the Republican Party. And Nixon himself incarnated that. So he's from a Quaker family. He believes in kind of sobriety and thrift and all these sort of what he sees

as traditional Republican virtues. And people always voted for them up to the 60s. And then- Then the changes. Right. And then the change happens. Then California, there's a huge demographic change. So California does become much more diverse. Those people start to lose their – so they're still there now,

but they're, I guess, outnumbered. But the 60s, hate Ashbury, are you going to San Francisco, flowers in your hair, all that kind of stuff. What's precipitating that because in a in a way california san francisco in particular becomes the epicenter of the 60s doesn't it it does but i guess that's because so california has massively expanded from not just from the gold rush but it's massively expanded due to the war and due to the growth of huge university complexes and things and electronics people people like hewlett packard are trading at this point you know so you have this i mean it really is the military industrial complex in action so you have all these people have moved

there in the 40s and 50s and these are now their kids who are involved in all who are driving all that so they're middle class kids by and large the universities like berkeley and stanford and so on and the university of southern california in la and there's a lot of them they're very affluent they're idealistic the vietnam war has kicked off the civil rights movement is going so that drives a lot of that they're rich enough not to have to worry about jobs yeah they're rich enough to be able to grow their beards. Of course. Yeah. That's why, actually, I bet you if you go into the sort of demographic sort of background of people who are in communes and people who are here, I mean, there's a lot of them who are in Britain. We would call them trustafarians. And I think, you know, that is a product of that big sort of demographic change and economic change that drives

the sort of beach boysy and then the Jefferson airplane-ish kind of side of California life in the late and that then produces its own backlash in the form of Ronald Reagan and it darkens doesn't it oh yeah in the 60, say Charles Manson. Yeah, and California itself, I think that, and probably lots of listeners to this podcast will agree, that when you think of California, you do think, as you said, Tom, of sort of 60s California. And there is a sense in which after the 60s, when you get into the 70s, the wheels slightly begin to come off.

There's a greater negativity. We're very conscious of that downside now. I mean, in the 70s, I suppose the great cultural icon that comes from San Francisco is Dirty Harry, a vigilante Republican voting cop in the form of Clint Eastwood, who then himself goes on to become Republican mayor of Carmel, right? Yeah, he does. Clint Eastwood does. And Reagan. I mean, Reagan is a Hollywood former Democrat, you know,

who becomes governor of California by basically saying, you know, law and order, he's going to forcibly wash hippies and make them shave their beards. And that's in the 70s? This is 66. 66? Oh, okay, about earlier. So California is always ahead of the rest of the United States,

and indeed, arguably, and we've got tons of questions about this, ahead of the rest of the Western world. And I think California was ahead and still is because of its affluence. And because it's the home of entertainment, but also of technology. So technology, computers in particular. So we're talking about the 70s, Dirty Harry. There's an argument, isn't there? When you look back in Californian history, the thing that will strike you about the 70s is things like Apple. So Steve Jobs and, you know. Yes. And they still, it's so telling that Apple still,

although so many of this, basically everything now comes from China or Taiwan, but they will still have, because they assemble it and send it out from California, they still have the made by Apple in California. And that California badge is so important to Apple's branding, isn't it? That's what you feel you're buying with an Apple computer or with an iPhone. You're buying the future. Absolutely. And of course, we would now, from our perspective, see that it's Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who are the key figures in, I guess, post-war, the whole of post-war Californian history, really.

Because it's the world we live in now, the wired world, is invented in California, essentially. Yeah, and I think it probably could only have been invented in California, And because, partly because of the military, because that's the place that's been chosen for so much military spending because of the Navy bases and stuff in World War II, partly because technology has been radio and TV. Firms have been working for California for decades,

obviously because of Hollywood. And then you have the growth of Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s and so many universities. I mean, California massively invested in universities in the 20th century. So Stanford, Berkeley, and the big state universities and so on. Because of that, you have this kind of,

all this sort of energy, which produces people like Steve Jobs and so on. And then it becomes, I mean, now they have, of have of course nick clegg they've given us the apple computer and we've given them nick clegg so you know everybody wins well so i i've got a friend who um lives in silicon valley and he very kindly took me on a tour around um all the google and Apple headquarters and things like that. And basically, it's a bit like Slough. I mean, it's... I know, doesn't it?

Considering that it's cultural, it's economic, it's financial power, it looks incredibly dull. But that's the weird thing about it, isn't it? Because sometimes when we've been to California, we'd say, oh, wouldn't it be amazing to live here and stuff? But there is this kind of sense that you're just living in a massive suburb i mean i apologize to our californian listeners i think we've been very i think we've been full of praise for california so it's it's time to to be a bit rude about if you lived in la if you lived in la i mean i love la i like going to la i like the sense of and it

is that that sense of you know i'm now an extra in a Hollywood movie. I'm walking around places that I've seen on TV. It's the most exciting place to go. I completely agree. I mean, if you're not from California, you feel like you're kind of coming home to your own dreams when you go there. You do. And it is incredible.

But then if you sort of said, imagine living at number 100, 1,000, you know, 1128 something drive. Palo Alto. Yeah. And you've got this massive house and a pool. I actually wouldn't know what, I wouldn't know what to do with myself. Except that actually, you know, if you're in Silicon Valley, the likelihood is your house isn't going to be that massive. No.

So even if you're. Jeff Bezos is living in the big house and you're living in the shack at the bottom of the road. Well, we looked at Zuckerberg's house. It was actually quite, you know, I mean, it's big, but it wasn't kind of Blenheim Palace or Versailles big. Yeah. And I guess that one of the questions that hangs over California now

is that essentially it's created the future twice. So it's created the future with Hollywood and then it's created the future with computing internet all that kind of stuff but um the question then is would it be able to do it again or has it become too stratified too much the victim of his own success are those at the top so wealthy yeah and that that essentially there's no way in now for those at the bottom. Would Steve Jobs now be able to make his way and start something up from scratch? Well, that's a good question because I think one of the issues with California is how it has become an object lesson in the rich and the poor. And there was a real – it's something that is very noticeable

as a British visitor to California. I'm not claiming that Britain is perfect by any means, but the the shoddiness of some of the public infrastructure so for example dick of axe dick of axis question right how is it that a very rich and cultured state also has massive homelessness problems where i've been told that human excrement you love a bit of human excrement is common to find in places like california opportunity for a call back to parallels with paris street urination so you can be rude about paris again and yeah so i have seen people urinating the streets in paris i've never

seen them doing it in california but dick of axes is onto something that there is a huge homelessness problem um uh you know places like san francisco have become very much a city of the haves and have nots but also there's generally an infrastructure problem so california has constant problems with the schools being hideously underfunded. Now, part of this, Tom, and this will not surprise you coming from a well-known Marxist historian,

the answer to this is very simple. Californians don't pay enough tax and they haven't paid enough tax since the 1970s. For you and your left-wing opinions. And one reason for that is that they have a very unusual kind of politics

that definitely will appeal to you. Yes, well, Simon Girdleston coming in again with some questions to what extent is california the product of its strange constitution direct ballot amendments introduced laws are often very liberal e.g. on free speech or conservative law and order and all exist at the same time impossible to change without another plebiscite plebiscitary politics that is california has been doing that for decades and it is a real, I think, a problem. Basically, we often ask in Britain, don't we, if politics turned into a colossal reality show and people were voting about everything, they were invited to vote. That's basically what California politics is. They have propositions. You'll have often seen people, our Britishers will have seen them

report to the newspapers, Proposition 12, Proposition 13, Proposition 7, to change, to basically limit, often to limit the powers of government. The most famous one is Proposition 13 from the 1970s, which limited how much you could charge in property taxes. Right. And so that's why, and so that's then the root of the problem. So they don't pay enough tax. I mean, and it's very hard to argue, to persuade people that they ought to pay more tax. And I think, yeah. And there's also an eccentricity in California politics. There's always been...

Governor Moonbeam. Yeah. Governor Moonbeam was Jerry Brown, obviously Schwarzenegger. Now, the weird thing about Schwarzenegger was he's actually a very moderate Republican. So he's actually quite in tune with California's political history.

But of course, you know, former Austrian bodybuilder, the Terminator, you know, there's a slight sense of owning California and you have this sort of celebrity political culture. Well, I'm glad you mentioned Terminator because of course one other thing that we should mention about California, perhaps before we finish,

is the fact that it's built on the San Andreas Fault. And therefore it's the, you know, it's like building Pompeii on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, except that Californians know that the big one may be coming. And I speak as someone whose wife was in Palo Alto in the 1990 earthquake. Really? She was living in a trailer. Gosh, that's glamorous generous which was the best best

place to be yeah i can imagine she just stood in the middle of the trailer she and her friends and they were they were fine um and there's a sense isn't there in which um thanks to hollywood and thanks to the threat of of earthquakes and the you know the various disastrous earthquakes that have hit San Francisco and LA and all these incredibly famous cityscapes, that California, although it stands in for a kind of utopian vision of the future, is also the most dystopian place on earth. This is, California offers us a vision

of the horrors that may be coming. So whether it's Blade Runner, probably the most influential vision of the future that's ever been made, or whether it's all the aliens and cyclones and monsters from the sea that periodically wipe California out. So we've got a question from Steven Jensen, friend of the show. Has California become a kind of bellwether state for the rest of the US culturally, economically, politically, technologically, demographically, showing how the rest of the country might look 10 to 20 years in the future? I'm sure that's true. I don't know. But I think definitely it serves as a kind of a template for how the rest of us in the world kind of imagine the future.

It is. And I'm glad you mentioned later on it, because, of course, Philip K. Dick is a great Californian writer and these sort of dystopian visions of the future. And I mentioned the historian Kevin Starr earlier on, so people who are interested in California should definitely check out his books. His emphasis on dreams, but he also talks a lot about nightmares. And I don't know that there's ever been a place, I mean, you'll know better than me, whether there are people in the classical world or something, ever had a sense of a particular place that embodied

the sort of possibility and the peril of human civilization so california has now become i think actually in some ways more strongly dystopian than utopian don't you that um we have a sort of a fear of what california may represent rather than a i mean of course we still have the sort of hollywood romantic yearning. Don't you think the fear is stronger now? I suppose because we've lived through a dystopian age period, we've, you know, the pandemic is the kind of thing that, that hits California in, in Hollywood films.

And that's what everyone said is, oh, it's just like a movie. And it's a movie because people in California have, have, have been giving portrayals of the future. That's exactly like that. What's that? If there's ever been a place like California before, do you think there's ever been anywhere like it?

Oh, I think, I mean, you know, I said one of the things that, that I found bizarre about the lack the relative lack of swagger about these great Silicon Valley behemoths is that absolutely, you know, Alexandria or Rome or Babylon or Baghdad or whatever, these were great cultural centers where people who lived there felt that they were

at the center of the world and they wanted to create monuments that would demonstrate that. In a sense, that's kind of what is lacking in the infrastructure the built-up spaces of california the the lots of the most famous buildings are ersatz buildings so whether it's the the hearst castle or the getty villa or whatever these are you know the very style of architecture is kind of pastiche across a lot of la california spanish revival kind of colonial revival stuff is pastiche but the real that you know the real monuments to californian wealth and power it is virtual i mean it's online it's it's what we're doing now we're recording recording this using iPhones, using Zoom on computers

in a way that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago, even, well, I guess even two years ago, perhaps. But we can do that because, in a sense, what we're doing is Californian. And that's the monument that it's raised, I think. Yeah, that's a great note. So much to end, I think. We're all living in a Californian world. Yes, okay.

We need to get back to much more distant periods, I think. So next week, Tom, we'll be having a podcast just like, uh. I think we're doing, aren't we doing, we're doing Hitler. No, we are doing Hitler. We're not doing Hitler. So that really is dystopian. So that's, and we've got, who are we doing?

We're doing Hitler with Sir Ian Kershaw. We're doing Hitler with Sir... Of course we are. That is a very exciting moment for our podcast because I would say, partly because he gave me my first academic job, I would say he has a very good claim to be Britain's greatest living historian.

So I'm very much looking forward to that. And definitely our leading biographer of Hitler. Definitely. Something to look forward to. But before Suryan and Hitler, Tom, we have Magna Carta. Magna Carta, yes, of course we do. With Professor Ted Vallance from the University of Roehampton, a friend of ours, who will be telling us whether Magna Carta died in vain,

whether Magna Carta matters. He's got a blog called Magna Carta Balls, or at least he had a blog. So it gives you a clue. There was no one better. Tune in on Thursday to hear that and tune in next week to hear Ian Kershaw on Hitler. And we'll have loads more on that.

So we will see you soon. Thanks a lot. Bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.