Mariner
Review by David Starkey
The first time I really noticed the bumper stickers on the cars in front of me was when I began driving, in the late 1970s. One of them, which appeared frequently in my hometown of Sacramento, read, “Welcome to California. Now Go Home.” The bumper sticker expressed a sentiment I frequently heard in my working-class neighborhood: California was too crowded. People who weren’t “from here” needed to return to wherever it was they came from.
Michael Hiltzik was such a newcomer, arriving in California from New York in 1981. He describes himself as “single, in my late twenties. Visions of California’s promise swirled in my head: freethinkers, liberal politics, cultural and ethnic diversity, sun, surf—an entirely novel landscape to engage mind and body.” It’s a description of the state and of the outlook of many of those who move here that applies just as well now as it did then; that is, it’s generally accurate but riven with exceptions.
Indeed, it doesn’t take much effort to poke holes into the Golden State’s halo of virtue, as any immigrant can tell you, and as Hiltzik reminds us: “The first decades of the twenty-first century were not kind to California.” Even those of us born and raised and still in love with the Bear Flag Republic are mostly happy to acknowledge its many flaws.
And, according to Hiltzik, what flaws they are! In Chapter 1, “A Terrestrial Paradise,” we learn of the incursions of Hernán Cortés, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, Sebastián Vizcaíno and Gaspar de Portolá into Alta California, a period that “marks the introduction of a dismal tradition in the relationship between whites and Indians.” That’s only the beginning of the exploitation and racism that will follow, as Americans enter the picture, most prominently after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma in 1848. Statehood arrived two years later and was followed by what Hiltzik calls “The Age of Genocide,” a time when “the voices of the Indian victims were almost never heard” because, as “a historian of the genocide observed, ‘there were not many survivors’ left to tell their stories.”
On and on the degradations and depredations go. Chinese immigrants are abused, killed or evicted after their heroic work building the transcontinental railroad. The railroad and its barons are responsible for swindling just about everyone they encounter, as Frank Norris showed in his 1901 novel The Octopus. Then there are the early water wars, which are especially vicious in the parched Southern and Central parts of the state, not to mention the calamitous San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
It’s pretty gloomy stuff overall, although Hiltzik does cover the “progressive revolution” of California Governor and US Senator Hiram Johnson, and John Muir’s (mostly) successful battle to save the Yosemite Valley from development. Yet even in the chapter on Muir, Hiltzik points out that the conservationist’s efforts to save the incomparable Hetch Hetchy Valley was doomed in the face of San Francisco’s need for fresh water.
While Part III, which covers the first sixty or so years of the twentieth century, is entitled “California Ascendant,” it’s not a particularity inviting ascendancy. We read about the “conjuring” of LA from the desert, which entails more water-rights and real estate chicanery, and, of course, Executive Order 9066, the forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps across the Western desert. Later, we have “The Selling of Richard Nixon” (a lousy bargain for just about everyone), Bedtime for Bonzo star Ronald Reagan’s rise to state and national power, the Santa Barbara oil spill, and of course the Watts Rebellion of 1966, about which Hiltzik says, “The most pertinent question raised after the riot was not why it happened but why the explosion had taken so long.”
Hiltzik was in the process of completing Golden State in 2022, when, for the first time, people were beginning to heed the bumper stickers of my youth and heading elsewhere. As a business columnist for the LA Times, he’s quite good at crunching numbers and making the “Crisis of Growth” and “The Era of Limits” we are in now feel like a reasonable conclusion to everything that has gone before.
It’s surprising, therefore, that after all the wickedness and bloodshed Golden State has confronted us with, the title of the epilogue is “Keeping the California Dream Alive.” Geez, you’re tempted to think, with dreams like these, who needs nightmares? Yet Hiltzik manages to point out some silver linings amidst all the clouds. Ours is a state with an “adventurous and ambitious spirit.” We are “a bellwether of change and social evolution in the nation and the world,” with citizens who possess a “willingness to test new ideas and spread them around the globe.” There’s no getting around the bleak picture Golden State paints of California, and yet being open to criticism, wanting to be better, is, I would argue another of the admirable hallmarks of my home state. Some of us, at any rate, wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else.
