Modern Living: LABORATORY IN THE SUN: THE PAST AS FUTURE

Thus a camera view of California. The surfing boys and leggy girls, the hikers and farmers and futurists, the kooks and the activists are all part of the scene—arbitrarily chosen parts, some more valid than others, but all typical and yet unique. The force that binds them together, the soul of California, is the search for a better life carried on by 20 million individuals, a tenth of the U.S. population. The will-o’-the-wisp—Californism—propels the matron to the massage parlor, impels the petitioner or protester to demonstrate against smog or close a campus in the name of students’ rights. It fuels the rage of the blacks and the Chicanos and the newly militant Chinese, who are all more conscious than minorities anywhere else of deprivation in the midst of fantastic plenty. It is the fear of losing their place in the sun that leads middle-class Californians to vote for a Ronald Reagan or a Sam Yorty.

Most of the trends that have recently and radically changed California life are familiar in the other America —though many first came to prominence in California. They include the hippie movement, the pop-drug culture, widespread sexual permissiveness, campus revolt and, since the Watts explosion in 1965, more virulent ghetto riots. They also include, in reaction to much of this, a political swing to the right. Not to mention pollution of all kinds and the resulting concern for salvaging the threatened environment.

A thousand Americans a day become Californians. They come West with high expectations that the wealth, the welcoming land, the easy ambience, the astonishing diversity of opportunity will all provide something far different from the dull sublunary routine of most mortals. To many of them, indeed, the new setting does mean an end to the grim struggle for existence, the beginning of a life that frees emotional energies for the pursuit of self.

Once they arrive—hardly anyone “settles”—no familial or community traditions bind them. “That’s why we have so many nuts out here,” says Los Angeles Pollster Don Muchmore. “People come and do things here that they wouldn’t normally do back home because such behavior is unacceptable. They don’t want to answer to the neighbors. They want the independence of being who they are and what they are, when they want to. It’s a sort of Paradise situation.”

Officially, Paradise opened for business in July, 1769, when Father Junípero Serra, alias Charlton Heston, planted the Cross at San Diego, establishing California’s first mission. This year the state is celebrating its bicentennial with dutiful if lackluster civic ceremonies. Fortunately, perhaps, most Californians are too busy having fun to pause for renditions of their state song:

I love you California.

You’re the greatest state of all:

I love you in the winter.

Summer, spring and in the fall.

The men who followed Serra to California were lusty freebooters (Puritans, for some reason, had little zest for Ä’l Dorado). The trait they shared was an ability to build what Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. approvingly called “a special brand of democracy, one based on the notion that the best good of all was served by everyone looking out for himself.”

They created what is still today virtually regarded as four different states. In the rugged but temperate north, they built San Francisco, a swashbuckling port city that reflected equally the liberal influence of Europe and the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.; hence the light touch of cosmopolitanism that suffuses the town. Those who populated the rolling, semitropical south—especially in the years during and following World War II—were mostly the staid Midwesterners and Southerners who came to buy so many square feet of sunshine, and the blue-collar workers who filled the factories; hence the heavy strain of conservatism that characterizes the region. The third state, running the length of inland California, is largely agricultural and might as well be East Texas with mountains. The fourth state, defying all maps and imagination, is Hollywood.

The Nation State

Taken together, all the component parts have generated a mighty economic machine. California’s gross “national” product keeps pushing upward, is now calculated at an annual rate of $108.8 billion, placing the state sixth in wealth among all the nations of the world. Its $4.3 billion agribusiness turns out 200 farm products.

The history of California’s business enterprise reads almost like a parody of a chamber-of-commerce oration. In 1904 an immigrant’s son, Amadeo Peter Giannini, founded a poor man’s bank in a San Francisco saloon. Today the Bank of America is the world’s largest, with assets of $25 billion, 952 Stateside branches and 94 overseas, and a creditcard system used by 25 million worldwide subscribers. Another poor boy. Charles B. (“Tex”) Thornton, who started out as a government clerk, is one of the pioneers of the conglomerates with his Litton Industries. It was California that sent the aerospace industry rocketing; today companies like Lockheed and North American Rockwell command a major portion of the market.

Electronics, oil, food processing, insurance, Savings and Loan associations, construction—all have been added to the spectrum of California’s economic life. Not the least of the benefits of this vitality is the workers’ share. California’s wage earners constitute a mass aristocracy that takes home about $1.5 billion every week; their per capita income ($4,111) is higher than that of any other state or any country on earth. Here too, think tanks like the Rand Corp. have evolved and become indispensable. With extraordinary skill —and hubris—their staffers tackle virtually every problem in America, from campus riots to noise pollution. Think tanks by the score have attracted an intellectual elite to California. Robert Hutchins, president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara, observes that the San Francisco-Los Angeles university axis has become “an intellectual flyway.”

In their pursuit of cultural enrichment, Californians, notably in the Los Angeles area, have created an institutionalized culture of enviable proportions. The County Museum of Art clocked an attendance of 1.25 million people last year. The Los Angeles Music Center provides an abundance of good music and drama. The U.C.L.A. concert and lecture series offered 575 events last year alone and drew an audience of 340,000 people.

Despite such glossy statistics, however, the observer from the East still finds something provincial about California culture; it is overeager, overly dutiful, and beset by a local boosterism mixed with inferiority feelings. In this area, as in many others, Californians are victims of what Sociologist David Riesman calls “masochistic narcissism—the idea that you are either the greatest or the worst.”

Crisis of Search

Having wrenched themselves loose from their pasts, a great number of the newly arrived discover that cultural roots, like heart transplants, do not take easily. The climate of tolerance and the very absence of tradition that encourage experimentation also deny people a sense of identity. And with the crisis of search comes the fear of failure.

For many, the sense of failure is intensified by the extremes of the California setting. Says Behavioral Scientist Richard E. Parson, Board Chairman of La Jolla’s Western Behavioral Sciences Institute: “The discovery of what we’ve got, and what we know it is possible to have, is greater in California than anywhere else. The difference between life on the beach at sunset and life in a freeway jam is so big that it makes awareness of the discrepancy much greater.”

The malaise that drifts like the coastal fog takes constantly changing forms. The population seems forever to be shifting fitfully, as if everyone is looking for a better motel. Some 500 people a day move out of the state altogether. Among the seekers who stay are a large number of the troubled souls, mainly young and middleaged, who join encounter groups, which proliferate in California like steelhead and artichokes and the wines that go with them.

Psychologist Carl Rogers, one of encounter therapy’s pioneers and now a resident fellow at the Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla, is convinced that group-grope “is the new psychological frontier. The people here are all transients. They’re saying, ‘What will I do for roots?’ ” The answer, it seems, lies in that Holy Grail of the psyche-oriented ’60s—what in California might be called MEANINTPEREL, or “meaningful interpersonal relationships.”

There is considerable debate about the value of these encounter groups. Some establishments, like the famed Esalen Institute at Big Sur, are rightly praised by reputable psychiatrists. Other observers argue that it is foolish to believe in salvation through collective bloodletting. Berkeley English Professor Frederick C. Crews, for one, calls encounter “extremely naive—a kind of utopianism based on the vulgarization of psychoanalysis.”

Crime, as in other places, continues to rise in California. More than 5% of California’s population was arrested last year on various charges. The rate of personal crimes of violence rose almost 18% in 1968. In San Francisco alone, there have been more than 109 homicides so far this year; forcible rape in September of this year has risen 101% over September 1968: 63 v. 30.

Suicide, Sickness and Divorce

And why should people move to San Francisco to kill themselves? In this incredibly attractive and civilized city, where —according to a recent Gallup poll—a majority of Americans would most like to live, suicide is the seventh commonest cause of death (28.2 per 100,000 people). In the U.S. as a whole, suicide ranks 11th (10.7 per 100,000). Alcoholism is another blotch on the winsome face of San Francisco. The experts admit that they cannot measure it accurately, although the most reliable indicator is found in the number of deaths from cirrhosis of the liver. This disease ranks tenth among killers in the U.S., sixth in California —and fourth in San Francisco.

Californians as a whole have the most improbable marriages in America. One of every two weddings ends in divorce —and the rate is climbing faster than the population increase: 34,632 in 1950 to 44,045 in 1960. In San Francisco health authorities estimate the homosexual population at 75,000—or 15% of the city’s sexually potent inhabitants. Highly organized, mindless swinging-couples groups also flourish in the cities. In their hunger for kicks, wife swappers go to extraordinary lengths: one swingers’ club in Los Angeles flashes pictures of available couples on a screen; another, in San Francisco, issues membership buttons and bumper stickers.

Thanks in part to the proximity of the Mexican border, the continent’s best-stocked marketplace for narcotics, drug addiction is widespread. The incidence of venereal disease is increasing. From 1964 to 1968, the number of diagnosed cases of syphilis and gonorrhea rose 165%. At the University of California’s Berkeley campus the gonorrhea rate in 1963-64 was 0.54 per 1,000 students, and the rate of contagion was 13 boys to 1 girl. In the past school year, the rate was 8.1 cases per 1,000 and the ratio—thanks to the Pill —was roughly 13 boys to 9 girls.

Many Californians assume a philosophical detachment toward such statistics. Behaviorist Richard Farson claims that the statistical evidence is actually a proof of Californians’ good emotional health. For example: “Our divorce rate shows that we have a higher expectation of marriage out here than anybody else. We have a lot of things here that remind us of what our marriages are and what they might be.” Similarly, some observers argue that the suicide rate is higher in San Francisco because people kill themselves most frequently in the most attractive environments. That may explain self-destruction in San Francisco, but the parallel stops there. Hungary and Finland have the highest suicide rates in the world, but few would classify either as Cockaigne. At any rate, millions of Californians reject the slightly desperate optimism that seeks to find hope in death and disorder, and view all this as evidence of a general decline in the American character.

The elderly, in particular, cling to religious cultism as a substitute for the stability of tradition. There are at least 200 such cults in Southern California alone, with a combined membership of about 25,000. These include “new thought” churches and spiritualist groups, as well as more esoteric fellowships like The Builders of The Adytum (congregation 35), which studies tarot, and Subud (60), which specializes in Javanese mystical cults. The hippies cling to the countercult of their own; along the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, they appear as youthful zombies stoned out of their skulls, and haunt the streets each night by the hundreds.

The Million Swingers

Strains of instability also marble political lifestyles. The citizens abhor conventional party politics, frustrating any attempt by political leaders to find easy accommodation with the voters. Moreover, almost a million registered Democrats are so independent-minded that they can be counted upon to swing Republican in the year the Democrats need them and vote Democratic the rest of the time. Californians have an unfettered political imagination. They have sent John Birchers to the legislature and the Congress, an actor to the Governor’s mansion, a tap dancer to the U.S. Senate, entertained the notion of electing an ex-child star to Congress, and helped place one of their local lawyers in the White House after denying him Sacramento.

Despite its masochistic tendencies, the electorate sometimes proves to be remarkably enlightened. The state was among the first to build great highways and airports, and has constructed a civil service system that permits virtually no political patronage. California has also led the nation in the establishment of civilized abortion and divorce legislation. Beginning next January, the single catchall ground for divorce, apart from the usual loophole of incurable insanity will be “irreconcilable differences which have caused the irremediable breakdown of the marriage.” The new statute doesn’t even call it divorce. The proper term now is “dissolution” (which may make for certain problems, since an ex-wife will thus technically become a dissolved woman).

The legislature has also discussed, but as yet has not enacted, Wolfenden-style laws recognizing the private rights of homosexuals. And a new law taking effect next month liberalizes (though it does not erase) marijuana restrictions.

The girls in shopping centers and on street corners who exhort citizens to exercise their constitutional rights through petition are merely engaging in a favorite California pastime. The state constitution permits the electorate in some cases to bypass the legislature; if they want to make a law, they simply produce an appropriate petition and put the proposition on the next election ballot. In this fashion, the voters have amended their constitution 47 times since 1912.

In their passion for special and often quite obscure causes, Californians tend to ignore broader and more clamorous social issues. Though long among the nation’s most ardent conservationists, they have nonetheless allowed untold pollution and desecration of their land, air, waters and wildlife. The nearly five million automobiles that churn through the Los Angeles megalopolis spew exhaust from 8,000,000 gallons of gasoline every day —thanks in large part to the inefficient smog-control devices that the cars are required to carry.

Sparkling San Diego, once proud of its clean air, now has an air-pollution problem: so has the San Francisco Bay Area and even California’s plastic Holy Land, Palm Springs. On Richardson Bay at Sausalito, houseboaters regularly pollute the waters with garbage and feces. Efforts of developers to commercialize areas of Point Reyes National Seashore in Northern California are only now being resisted, but the conservationists have not won that battle yet. Abalone and kelp fishermen are fast destroying their chief competitors, the sea otters —who now number only 400 along the entire California coastline. The brown pelican is virtually extinct, a victim of pesticides.

Another victim of apathy is California education. The wealthiest state in the nation ranks fourth (after New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) in the amount it spends for the education of its children, and tolerates a second-rate public school system. In addition, a political crisis threatens the nine campuses of the University of California. One of the greatest public education facilities in the land, it boasts, among other things, some of the best science faculties—including 14 Nobel laureates—of any university anywhere.

During the Reagan regime, U.C. has come under unrelenting attack. Exploiting widespread concern, the Governor has used ridicule and money power in an attempt to cow university administrators into suppressing student and faculty dissent. He recently decreed an $88 million budget cut, which may reduce future student enrollment and perhaps even force one of the campuses to close. If Reagan has his way, U.C. may also be required to change its tuition-free policy, which would further cut enrollment.

Human Laboratory

The mixture of reformist zeal and conservatism, of distrust of Government interference and insistence on Government help, are not unique to California. But it does lend California politics an especially unreal air. As visitors so often note, this sense of the unreal is everywhere: from the packaging of political candidates to the packaging of death at Forest Lawn, from Hollywood emotions to the plastic flowers and the trashcans that are disguised to look like tree trunks. These suggest the popular California metaphor: the world as euphemism. Something slightly disguised here, contrived there. And yet, and always, throughout the state there is something more. Somewhere between the cosmetics above and the San Andreas fault below, there is a kinetic energy and what can only be described as a sense of angry optimism. Earthquakes and the smog will not destroy California; perhaps the only thing that could is stasis—and no one has ever been able to say that California is standing still.

The thinkers and doers in this experimental human laboratory are immensely busy. Having created so much smog, they are bound to be the first in the alleviation of it, perhaps by perfecting the carbonfree auto engine, perhaps through more stringent traffic legislation. Little by little, they will assume firmer control over environmental deterioration by creating bigger units of government that can act on a regional rather than a local basis.

Having invented urban sprawl, Californians may be among the first to find ways of revitalizing and rebuilding the inner cities. Los Angeles, with its stubborn refusal to invest in efficient rapid transit, may yet be obliged to give up the automobile and go to subways; for a model, there will be San Francisco’s computer-controlled BART (Bay Area Transit) system, which is, after many years, now within reach of completion.

What Will Happen?

Prisons will be renamed, like the one at Chino, “Institutions for Men,” and will permit weekend connubial visits for the married inmates. Universities will adopt cable-television systems that will permit students to “attend” their classes at home—and, incidentally, to keep their cars from jamming the highways. There will be no letup from nude-look fashion designers, who foresee the day when it will be commonplace for women to wear only body cosmetics from the waist up. The men will continue to wear clothes—but ever flashier ones. The antiestablishmentarians who created the underground press have already been trying some new wrinkles. Underground FM radio now broadcasts acid-rock, counsels draft resistance and dropping out.

There was even a short-lived UHF underground TV station in Ventura, near Los Angeles. It failed for lack of money but UHF holds the promise—or threat —of providing inexpensive telecasting for a vast youth market.

The economic giant will continue its incredible growth. By 1975, says the Bank of California’s economic consultant, Alden Fensel, California’s gross state product will reach $150 billion, and business spending $18 billion (from the present $13.3 billion). By the same year, California’s population will have risen to 23.5 million, and its personal income will have climbed from $81.7 billion to $100 billion.

There is always hope that the solutions to California’s human problems can also be found. Meanwhile, in the search for new answers and guidelines, California is still faltering—and is paying in human terms. Lord James Bryce, the great English jurist and student of American life, suggested as much in 1909, when he addressed an assembly at Berkeley. Bryce asked: “What will happen when California is filled by fifty millions of people, and its valuation is five times what it is now, and the wealth will be so great that you will find it difficult to know what to do with it? The day will, after all, have only twenty-four hours. Each man will have only one mouth, one pair of ears, and one pair of eyes. There will be more people—as many perhaps as the country can support—and the real question will be not about making more wealth or having more people, but whether the people will then be happier or better.” Sixty years later, it is still the real question—for Californians and, inevitably, the rest of the nation.