Over at Tablet, Jeremy Stern has a terrific long profile of Palmer Luckey, the self-taught engineering genius who invented the Oculus Rift; sold out to Meta for $2 billion; got fired by Meta following a moral panic over a political contribution; and went on to found Anduril Industries, a huge and innovative defense tech company. He is 31.
Pretty interesting! However, because it's a particular obsession of mine, I want to highlight this passage about Southern California, where Luckey grew up:
This is the region to which those hundreds of thousands of Dust Bowl migrants fled after the Depression, and where many of them then spent World War II assembling radar units and guidance controls for submarines, missiles, and fighter aircraft. After the war, it’s where a landscape of citrus groves and cattle ranches was transformed into a suburban sprawl of military bases, defense plants, malls, and swimming pools. Fantastical American curiosities like the suburban megachurch, the neo-Pentecostal “charismatic” clinic, drive-thru restaurants, drive-in churches, and Disneyland were created here. It’s where a distinctive style of dress was honed—Palmer Luckey’s style—“shorts, colorful open-necked shirts, sandals,” as an October 1945 feature in Life coined it. Here, where Luckey was born, is where the back of the patrician Northeastern Republican establishment was broken during the Cold War, and replaced by a new power base.
It wasn't just Dust Bowl migrants who formed the core of California's growth in the 20th century, it was Midwesterners in general from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and nearby states. It was in California where they created a strange blend of stolid, hard-working entrepreneurs with bizarre cults of religion, food, health, and conspiracy theories. Ronald Reagan is probably the most famous Californian to embody both cultures in one person.
None of this is any secret. But I've always wished there were a good, book-length treatment of this phenomenon. The astonishing thing is that somehow it worked spectacularly instead of destroying itself through the sheer centrifugal force of millions of intolerant little squabbles. How that happened is a story worth telling.
"who invented the Oculus Rift"
Wasn't there a lawsuit about this? Stern doesn't mention it.
My History of California (yes, a mick course but fun and informative) prof at UCLA in the early1970s said so many Iowans had relocated to LA in the 1930s the huge 4th of July picnic celebration in Long Beach had separate areas set out depending on what country in Iowa you were from.
As a boomer who grew up on the west coast, when someone asked where your family was from, you didn’t say Britain or Germany, but rather Illinois or Kansas.
I actually think its not "astonishing" that it worked, its more like "inevitable" that a US State which (1) had as many (give or take) elite universities as Massachusetts and New York, and (2) had enough land mass to also grow all its own crops, and (3) which also had plenty of space for people, and (4) had room for a few major ports, and (5) had the weather California enjoys, ----------- I mean, of course it became California. I didn't even list the motion picture industry which would have been worth it too.
I really don't think Iowans or Wisconsinites were any sort of determining factor.
California's position on the West Coast does contribute to a more diverse population, which helps. If it were down to "Iowans" then how come Iowa is Iowa?
Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, raised and educated in the (mostly Upper) Midwest, spent half my life (so far) in New England, where I soon realized I was always meant to be. Now an ‘expat’ in the Upper Midwest again. New England has been prosperous for centuries, despite successive movements of agriculture, forestry and multiple industries westward and southward. There must be a good book about this long-lived success story, too. I think that the excellent educational institutions play a major role, and California has not been lacking there, either. Good luck, may you sustain your good fortune for another few centuries.
I tease a Iowa transplant with links to the Iowa Picnic: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2019/08/20/iowa-expats-have-met-yearly-picnic-long-beach-over-century-california-native-iowan-los-angeles-times/2060426001/
and by telling her how lucky she was to get out of Iowa!!!
Oakies for the win???
Echoing the above comments. California had so many natural resources - open space, water, good weather, the ocean - that it was bound to succeed. It opened up just as our technology and science really accelerated.
I was part of the migration. In 1980 I was recruited from a small lab in Michigan to come work as a software engineer in a tech company in the Bay Area. There were no such opportunities in Michigan.
Yeah, turns out people liked the long post-war economic boom and didn't really care who was from Missouri or Ohio, weird and inexplicable.
For a few months in 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department launched a foreign excursion of sorts -- a “Bum Blockade” on the state’s borders. The LAPD deployed 136 officers to 16 major points of entry on the Arizona, Nevada and Oregon lines, with orders to turn back migrants with “no visible means of support.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-09-me-then9-story.html
Unfortunately the full story of this is paywalled, but it’s not as if the “Oakies” were welcomed.
Here’s a non paywalled version of the event:
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ca-bumblockade/#:~:text=Even%20with%20the%20assistance%20of,powers%2C%20Police%20Chief%20James%20E.
"Unfortunately the full story of this is paywalled, but it’s not as if the “Oakies” were welcomed."
For more information, there's a good book out there about it. Grapes of....something or other.
I just wrote a brief on the history of California housing and in my research I found it noted that because so many service men (and women) were stationed here for training in WWII that many decided to move here after the war. The housing boom the followed the end of WWII was simply astonishing. Lakewood, CA for example, was 17,500 homes built over three years in assembly line fashion.
I used this publication fairly extensively: Tract Housing in California, 1945-1973:
A Context for National Register Evaluation
https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/environmental-analysis/documents/ser/tract-housing-in-ca-1945-1973-a11y.pdf
"Oakies"? I guess they're from 'Oaklahoma'. 😉
Seriously, I used to live just a few miles from a hill in Hayward (SF Bay Area) that well before I was born was called "Okie Hill". That past had already faded by the time I grew up so I never knew about that until far into adulthood.
Kevin Starr's books don't do it for you? "Golden Dreams", specifically, really gets at that weird culture you mentioned.
Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
"After the Depression?" There was no "after the Depression" until after the war. I know this directly. My dad was an Okie. They had to leave Oklahoma because the doctor told his father the dust was going to kill him. He lived in a tent in a Hooverville outside Bakersfield for two years. His mother picked vegetables. His father walked into town each day, collected a pocket full of broken watches, having acquired some watchmaker tools in a trade with a drifter, spent the night repairing them, and walked back the next day to do it again.
Jeremy Stern could stand to learn a little history. I guess he's under the impression the Depression ended when Roosevelt was elected?
The depression didn’t end when FDR was elected, but it did end with WWII Military spending constituted a huge Keynesian economic stimulus. The government instituted wage controls to control inflation, at which point Henry Kaiser had the idea of offering health care as a way to attract workers for his shipyards, the origin of our employer based health care system.
KD: "It wasn't just Dust Bowl migrants who formed the core of California's growth in the 20th century, it was Midwesterners in general from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and nearby states."
And many lived in southern Los Angeles County (e.g. Downey) and Orange County. They arrived as conservatives, and stayed that way for generations. Were a big factor in the demise of California's moderate socialist orientation.
Around the time that this song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsiFotSjgpQ
was on the radio, during Reagan's first term ... as governor, I recall reading this book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Days_of_the_Late,_Great_State_of_California
IIRC, the book covers much of the material that KD is curious about.
"Southern California Country: An Island on the Land" by Carey McWilliams is also excellent.
IIRC (and as you may imagine, it has been many years since I last read it, likely a half century or more) I first learned about Aimee Semple McPherson in a chapter from LEIGHTON, ISABEL (Ed.). The Aspirin Age 1919*1941. Pp. ix, 491. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949*
*Some googling revealed that McWilliams wrote the chapter on McPherson!
What was chosen became multipliers, not additions. It's as simple as that.
https://youtu.be/eiaz9giH7Ys
What Kevin points to *is* a remarkable development overall, and maybe the most remarkable element for me is that up through about WWI CA was probably the most openly and consistently racist of the Union states, and I think by a long shot. I've always thought that only started to change in the 1920s when midwesterners (like my great-aunt and her husband) and later the proverbial Okies moved to Socal in large enough numbers to finally give the state a definitive white majority. But I haven't seen any histories that would confirm that.
Two things are central to this story, in my view-- water, and federal money-- so I think royko and J Frank are right to point to them.
Of course the Socal we know today would be impossible without imported water. But beyond that, just think how the federal money poured in. The whole Pacific War was run out of San Diego, and half the aircraft industry was transplanted to LA wholesale. In US history surveys I used to use a map that showed just aerospace spending patterns during the Cold War, and that region dwarfed any others. Add to that what the Navy spent then and during the Vietnam War in the area, and other service branches, and I'd be willing to bet that the flood of federal war and Cold War money was the catalyst for pretty much everything else in the way of economic growth there (ironic, considering majority Orange County political opinions not so long ago). People can get along much better when times are generally good.
By comparison CA is also much more centralized than most other states, I think a Progressive-era legacy that's reflected in the higher ed systems, zoning, resource control, and has roots in the Greater New England culture of Norcal. But the money coming in was what allowed that to matter.
"CA was probably the most openly and consistently racist of the Union states,"
How do you measure that?
In case you might still be paying attention to this, (I've been on the road and couldn't reply before now), a reply I'll try to keep short because the topic can get very complex. (And failed miserably at doing.)
You can start around the Gold Rush and near the beginning of statehood with the Foreign Miner's Tax, $20 a month (probably at least $1000 or more a month in today's dollars, I haven't checked on Measuringworth) that was supposed to be paid by any non-citizens but was collected at first from Chinese and Mexicans (remembering that only a few years before, Mexicans were at home in CA and the border crossed over them) and shortly was collected only from Chinese.
In the 1870s, after the railroad-building boom ended and laborers on them were cut loose, a lot of them congregated in cities and towns. SF passed at least 3 major regulations to discourage this, two of them framed as public-health measures. These were the laundry law (a low tax on laundries that used horse carts for deliveries, a much higher tax for laundries that used human runners as the Chinese ones generally did-- $60 vs $8); a "cubic foot" law that made shift sleeping practically illegal and was enforced on Chinese but not others; a "queue law" that required arrestees to have their heads shaved which, if done, exposed these guys to instant execution if they ever went back to China. There were other restrictions on business licenses, legal and de facto, and eventually a state-level ban on land ownership by "aliens ineligible to citizenship," which under the 1870 Naturalization Act meant immigrants who were of neither white nor African descent.
That ineligibility also included Japanese immigrants, who migrated in substantial numbers from around the 1890s and were carefully curated by the Japanese government before they were allowed to leave. In SoCal they pursued very intensive farming and dominated the local produce markets. In SF some of the men went to lower-level schools to learn English and this led to a whipped-up controversy which the school board responded to by moving the guys into the segregated Chinese schools. A diplomatic incident followed, resolved by the so-called "Gentleman's Agreement" of 1908 that got them back in unsegregated schools and committed Japan to not allowing ordinary laborers to emigrate. Meanwhile back in SoCal the land law was amended in 1920 to try to deal with the evasions people worked out. (The WWII internment was a culmination much more than it was a panic reaction, from that point of view.)
Over the whole period from about the 1870s through WWII, what in most of the US was considered the "color line" between white and black was, in CA, between white and everybody else, and there were a lot of ethnic groups in that "everybody else." Quite a large black population that I honestly don't know much about, derived partly from migration after the Civil War and, I'm guessing, from railroad and port employment; a significant Native American population that I also don't know much about; also from the early part of that period Filipinos, either via Hawaii or directly, and obviously facilitated by having Spanish language in common (in the Spanish Empire days there was a lot of contact across the Pacific); and others.
The color line between white and everybody else was institutionalized as early as the first statehood constitution, which didn't allow court testimony for or against white persons by anyone who was black, mulatto, or Indian; a CA Supreme Court ruling extended the prohibition to include Chinese people before 1855; this was probably more expansive than similar provisions in some other free states.
Beyond the provisions above, I presume it was enforced in large part by custom and economic pressures and practices, as in most non-segregated states that didn't have a history of slavery. This means things like restrictive covenants, which people today tend to ignore because they've been unenforceable since 1948 and in some cases 1968 but they really mattered and were common (I'm mildly curious about original deed provisions in Kevin's part of Orange County, for example, both for original sale and for subdivisions built and sold before 1950-- were they "restricted," as happened in a lot of places?).
Beyond that, CA had its very own anti-miscegenation law from at least as early as 1880, and it was omnibus-- basically, white people couldn't marry anyone from any other group, but the others were free to do what they wanted. At a Wikipedia-fueled guess, as of the 1920s about half the non-Confederate states outlawed mixed marriages, and CA apparently continued to until 1948.
Enforcement of the color line through deed restrictions had some notorious effects. I think I know what this will sound like now, but in Fresno in the early 20C, covenant restrictions kept Armenians in the non-white neighborhoods, and they weren't allowed in most civic organizations. There were also attempts to have Armenians classed as "aliens ineligible to citizenship" who would be barred from owning land under the state's Alien Land Acts, on the grounds that Armenia is in Asia; that was prevented only by federal court rulings in 1909 and 1924 that essentially held Armenians to be Aryans.
There's more, but I've already blathered on way too much. The sum of it is that if you can find another Union state with anything like this kind of record on race/ethnic relations, please let me know-- the combination of custom and law over the whole period is what I think is extraordinary. Granted CA's ethnic composition from 1850 through the 1960s was much more complex than in most other states, and that the white population was (I believe but can't document) either much less of a majority than in other states, or not a majority at all, until after the Dust Bowl, and that it's a fair bet that the less secure a dominant class feels, the more likely its members are to enforce their position zealously.
And that would be an explanation, but from today's point of view not an excuse to continue on the same path. And it underlines the transformation Kevin is talking about-- in just the generation or so after the Zoot Suit riots, basically.
“America is built on a tilt and everything loose slides to California.”
You forgot about Jews, Kevin. And I'm not talking about Hollywood.
No story about how CA became CA after WWII makes any sense without the great migration of Jews from the east.
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