Dominion From Sea To Sea Part 5

The war also made clear to the nation and the world that scientific talent in California took a backseat to no one: Oppenheimer's direction of the Manhattan Project is the obvious example, but there were many others from Cal Tech, Berkeley, and Stanford. During the war Was.h.i.+ngton poured money into security-related science and technology all along the Pacific Coast. The Pentagon subvened the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which not only studied rockets but produced them by the thousands for the war effort. The Scripps Inst.i.tute of Oceanography in La Jolla proved invaluable to the navy through its work on ocean currents and ocean floor topography. Roosevelt created the Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1941 and got Vannevar Bush to run it. This office provided nearly $ioo million in research contracts to western universities, but the government put much larger sums, well into the billions, into Manhattan Project facilities at Los Alamos and the plutonium factory at Hanford, Was.h.i.+ngton-building entirely new cities, not just reactors and bombs. Los Alamos materialized in 1943 on a remote 7,300-foot plateau across the Rio Grande from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a closed town of about 6,5oo that was isolated enough to build atomic bombs in total secrecy but near enough to Albuquerque to transport in a myriad of equipment; the most expensive government project in history, it had the most impact on the world-and because of its remote ness and secrecy, the least impact on New Mexico. Likewise most people in Was.h.i.+ngton had no idea that eight reactors cooked plutonium night and day at Hanford.49 War Remakes the Pacific Coast.

If Southern California was awash in defense contracts, the Bay Area, Seattle, and Portland weren't far behind-relatively speaking. Manufacturing employment and value-added had actually fallen by an amazing 5o percent in Seattle from 1919 to 1939, a result of the Depression hitting particularly harshly there, but even in the Roaring Twenties when Los Angeles was booming, Seattle grew by less than 5o,ooo. There were more wage earners in Seattle in 1920 than in both Seattle and Tacoma by 1940, so war industry had a correspondingly dramatic impact. By late 1943 when war production peaked, defense employment stood at 385,ooo-greater than Seattle's entire population in 1940. The city ranked third in per capita war contracts, and eventually its orders totaled nearly $6 billion; manufacturing leaped forward by 265 per cent. (When the war began in 1939, the total value of all industry in Seattle was $70 million.) Boeing had about 4,000 workers in 1939 and sales under $io million a year, about 14 percent of total Seattle manufacturing. Then the Royal Air Force learned about the B-17 Flying Fortress, and io,ooo people were working at Boeing by Pearl Harbor. Like Southern California firms, Boeing got the capital from Was.h.i.+ngton for its costs and an additional fixed fee of profit, and then threw itself into a totally new endeavor-ma.s.s production. No one had ma.s.s produced aircraft before, but Boeing had a head start in manufacturing very large planes. It built giant enclosed fields to house dozens of B-17s or B-29s at a time and perfected new methods of rapid a.s.sembly-not an a.s.sembly line so much as a series of platforms and lifts enabling skilled workers and engineers to reach to the top of these huge bombers and into their innards, putting them together, testing them, painting them, swarming around them-the planes were stationary and the workers moved, unlike Ford's a.s.sembly line. The B-29 was "a revolutionary aircraft, the first intercontinental bomber" in Richard Rhodes's words; four i8-cylinder engines rated at 2,200 horsepower each lifted a bomb-loaded B-29 weighing 135,000 pounds into the air, propelled it to a top speed of 350 miles per hour, and kept it going for 4,000-mile missions. At the peak of production Boeing had 55,ooo workers (nearly half of whom were women) and sold $6oo million worth of warplanes; it was able to turn out one bomber every ninety minutes. Tens of thousands more worked at its factories in Everett, Renton, Bellingham, Chehalis, and Aberdeen. Seattle acc.u.mulated $5.6 billion in war contracts, or nearly ten times the level of all Seattle manufacturing in 1939. When the war ended, the Was.h.i.+ngton economy did not tank, as many predicted; veterans and war workers bought cars, homes, and a new suburban life with their savings and their war-ballooned wages.50 "5,oooth B-17 Flying Fortress Rolls Out," 1942. Copyright Boeing.

Portland had about 200,000 residents in 1940, nearly 360,000 five years later, with about a third of them working in s.h.i.+pyards. Just to the north of the city was Vanport, an empty mudflat in 1940, which became "the world's largest war housing city" by 1943, with 40,000 people-most of them working in Kaiser s.h.i.+pyards. Women came pouring out of the house and into the factories, with 40,000 working in s.h.i.+pyards in Portland and nearby Vancouver, Was.h.i.+ngton. Henry Kaiser hired more tens of thousands to work in Portland s.h.i.+pyards, brought by the trainload from "back East." Brand new, high-tech aluminum factories in Tacoma and Spokane, using cheap hydroelectricity from the Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams, provided the base metal for Boeing fuselages."

Electricity for a different industry, also requiring enormous amounts, went to the factories at Hanford, Was.h.i.+ngton-the secret plutonium capital of America, located downriver from the Grand Coulee Dam and the town of Wenatchee. With arms merchant DuPont in charge (its armaments contracts went back to the Revolutionary War, but at Hanford it took only a dollar of profit over costs to avoid the "Merchants of Death" label), specialists built eight water-cooled graphite reactors to cook plutonium in aluminum tubes; three chemical separation plants went up nearby to handle reprocessingcalled "Queen Marys" because they were nearly as long as this pa.s.senger liner. Enrico Fermi supervised the loading of the reactors in September 1944, and early in 1945 Colonel Franklin T. Matthias hand-carried the first flask of weapons-grade plutonium to show a group from Los Alamos Laboratory. It didn't even weigh loo grams, but it was just about the world's total supply. In subsequent months heavily guarded convoys of ambulances moved more and more plutonium to Los Alamos, over country highways and usually under cover of darkness. The plutonium core for the first bomb left Hanford for Los Alamos by car on July it, and it exploded at Alamogordo five days later. (After the war Richland, near Hanford, was proud to call itself "Atomic City," with a high school football team called "Bombers" and a mushroom cloud for the school's emblem.)52 Conclusion: A Continental Behemoth.

At the end of the war, American industry and weaponry was the best in the world, but it was a world with hardly any rivals left. The sole superpower, this continental behemoth now could dominate in any direction-the Atlantic, the Pacific, and North and South, where Canada and Latin America were essentially American dependencies-and it had no rivals. The British ran their empire from small islands, as had j.a.pan; one empire was gone and the other was going. The Axis powers were in ashes. The Soviet Union was a continental power, but almost all its weight was concentrated west of Moscow, a region mostly demolished by the n.a.z.is; it had suffered more grievously than any other country (27 million dead), and its ma.s.sive land armies found their critical postwar purpose in maintaining domination in Eastern Europe. Stalin used to read books about the gold rush to figure out how Siberia and the Soviet Far East might be transformed on the American model. But as it happened, there was just one American model, a hegemony unlike any the world had ever seen emanating from a productive continental homeland, a compelling set of ideas (the Four Freedoms were the latest expression), a seductive lifestyle born in Southern California and channeled to the world by Hollywood, and an integrated industrial base from sea to sea.

Putting all war supply contracts for combat equipment and "other" together with wartime projects for industrial and military facilities, California led all other states in the West with $35 billion, Was.h.i.+ngton came next, while Oregon got a mere margin above $2 billion. No other western state was even close, except for Texas: it got nearly $8 billion in contracts and projects, helping manufacturing output to double between 194o and 195o and saving firms like Brown & Root from bankruptcy; with early contracts to build naval air stations, by the end of the war this company bought two surplus pipelines and set up Texas Eastern, later a Fortune 500 firm that operated much like Bechtel-building infrastructure at home and military bases abroad .51 The following table shows the extraordinary leaps forward in manufacturing from 1939 to 1947, with California and Was.h.i.+ngton more than tripling their valueadded figure, while Oregon's quadrupled.

In early 1945 industrial production in Los Angeles County exceeded the entire industrial value of Detroit before the war and stood second only to Detroit in total war production. More than 4,000 defense plants had sprung up, but the older textile industry had also grown remarkably, by 475 percentsupplying fabric for military uniforms being the major reason.55 Everyone feared that industry would not last in California after the war ended, perhaps causing another depression, because so much of the work was war-relatedand indeed by 1946 three out of four aircraft workers in Southern California were out of work. At the time automobiles and the continental network of trains remained the primary means of travel, and few understood the potential of the commercial air business. The aircraft companies were in the doldrums for years after 1945, but the Korean War instantly revived the industry, and after that war ended they quickly switched to civilian aircraft production, doing well with the Lockheed Constellation, the Douglas DC-7, and especially Boeing's 707.

Private industrial investment was also intensive during the war, around $400 million in toto, and these industries were also able to retool quickly once the conflict ended. Los Angeles had four auto factories producing 154,000 cars in 1941; they produced 650,000 in 1948. Kaiser also adapted quickly, moving into automobile production (Kaiser, Kaiser-Frazer, and the innovative Henry j compact car) and into home production on an industrial scale: he built 2,000 new homes on the Panorama Ranch between Van Nuys and San Fernando, about fifteen miles from Los Angeles. Kaiser Community Homes combined everything he had learned about industry and people: he charged $4,000 to $5,000 with a down payment of $15o, and he put new amenities into each home: garages, was.h.i.+ng machines, dishwashers, backyards for barbecues, with the GI Bill being the new Kaiser connection to the federal government. Kaiser was, of course, a piker when it came to ma.s.s-produced housing-in Lakewood, near Long Beach, it was eight homes to an acre, i,ioo square feet per home, $7,575 for two bedrooms, $8,525 for three, and on Palm Sunday 1950, 25,000 people lined up to buy one.16 Manufacturing in five California counties, 1940-2000. United States Census Bureau, California Department of Finance.

Among American historians Gerald D. Nash stands out for his work on the industrial transformation of the West in the 194os, and like any important historian he has his detractors; the basic issue is whether World War II was a revolutionary transformation of California, like the gold rush, or just a large but still incremental upsurge in industry. Roger Lotchin argued that New York created more jobs during the war than Los Angeles had in toto when the war ended, and Chicago nearly did as well; of course extraordinary changes took place in the West, he wrote, but rapid transformation is the norm in California.17 He is right on both counts, but the first point is spurious because New York and Chicago were industrial cities for a century, and new wartime jobs have to be registered against the lost jobs of the Depression, whereas Los Angeles and other Pacific Coast cities barely had factory labor and got industrialized for the first time during the war, usually with the latest equipment and mostly in high-tech manufactures (even Kaiser's s.h.i.+pyards were hightech, with entirely new methods of prefabrication), a base from which a fully sustained transformation would unfold continuously (after some remarkably minor regress and disruption in the two or three years after the war ended).

Lotchin's second point is valid, at least in California: the war brought abrupt change to a state that had thrived on it for a century. But that is what I have been arguing all along. What is missed in this criticism is (I) the breathtaking completion of a national market across the continent with multiple nodes of Pacific industry, commerce, and finance, breaking any dependency that the West might previously have had on eastern industry and capital; (2) the opening of entirely new possibilities for intensive development in the Pacific states and linking enterprises on both sides of the great ocean; (3) the telescoping into four years of what would ordinarily have taken a quarter-century or more to achieve; (4) the colossal expansion of American military power in the Pacific, the West, and especially along the coast-army, navy, marines, air force, but also jets, rockets, and atomic energy; and (5) the unprecedented role that the central state played in stimulating, organizing, and financing one industry after another-which marks a complete break with any previous episode of industrialization in American history.

Nash's emphasis is on social change, but from the standpoint of political economy (or a Gerschenkron or a Schumpeter), the 1940s const.i.tuted an astonis.h.i.+ng departure in American history. Not only was the West industrialized overnight and fitted out with world-cla.s.s high-tech firms (like Lockheed and Boeing), state-of-the art laboratories and research centers (like the Cal Tech labs or Los Alamos), and a huge new flow of human capital (millions of men and women with factory skills, and later, millions of veterans with college educations, thanks to the GI Bill), but the war created for the first time in world history a continental nation with a combined, integral industrial economy from the Atlantic to the Pacific, an "organic whole" that emerged from the war unscathed, now const.i.tuting fully 5o percent of global industrial production. And for the first time in American history the Pacific states and much of the West were independent: in oil, steel, factories, and investment capital. Things had not s.h.i.+fted out of plumb: instead the plumb suspended between the Atlantic and the Pacific had disappeared, as the United States now had three formidable industrial bases in the Northeast, the Midwest and the Pacific.

For the first time in its history California now feels that it is definitely a part of that fantastic world around the rim of the Pacific ... the great world of the future.

-CAREY MCWILLIAMS.

os Angeles had reached a level of development in 5o years that took New York 175 years to accomplish, Carey McWilliams wrote, as the war "completely revolutionized the economy of California" and brought to a conclusion the "insular phase" of the state's development-the sense of detachment from the continent and the Pacific Ocean. He went on to link all this to the mantras of the 198os: the "fantastic world" around the Pacific Rim. But he said it in 1946 (and he was right).' California had several insular phases in its history: its eruption out of the ocean, the millennia of cat's-paw imprints made by Native Americans, a salutary 350 years of "island" isolation after the conquest of the New World, and a century of nonindustrial, even pastoral, existence as the pot of gold at the end of a very lengthy train ride. World War II ended all of that.

The Pacific states were now fully integrated with the national market and industrial complex, tens of millions of new migrants arrived to transform one town after another into small cities or big suburbs, and rapid economic growth propelled California toward its current position-a powerhouse that would rank second only to Germany if it were in Europe. Aviation, aeros.p.a.ce, aluminum, electricity, industrial agriculture, Hollywood, television, the universities-all these were cutting edge and expanding dramatically. They were all in place by 1950, and they have all moved and developed within existing tracks since that time. To put it another way, the West Coast that we see today would have been unimaginable in 194o but quite predictable by r95o. The dramatic wartime industrial and military transformations in the Pacific states, and especially California, created an infrastructure that enabled, shaped, and constrained subsequent development. This all amounted to a tectonic s.h.i.+ft that remade the United States and its relations.h.i.+p to the world.

The reader has been asked to think about various aspects of western and Pacific development from the 1840s through World War II. The next period of Pacific history, however, hurries up to the present and is more or less familiar to most Americans. After 1945 the Pacific states inhabited a structure of action that unfolded along the lines of a predictable logic. Instead of a host of new-new things, we mostly have elaborations of existing tendencies and potentials. California's suburban lifestyle plastered the state and increasingly the nation, but it had been invented in the 192os, just as Californians had taken Ford's utilitarian automobile and turned it into a personal statement. Water and power ran along grooves established in the first half of the century. Great firms like Lockheed and Boeing burst forth in the 1940s, which only makes their prominence today all the more predictable. California's university system expanded beyond imagination, but the same three schools still dominate it: Berkeley, Stanford, and Cal Tech. Agribusiness went from strength to strength-just as it had before the Depression. (By the 196os California produced all the artichokes, figs, almonds, nectarines, and olives in the country; nearly all the lemons, dates, and walnuts; and a third of the nation's fruit. It was also first in beef cattle, turkeys, tomatoes, and beet sugar, second in cotton, third in milk.)2 The vast garden of oranges and lemons mostly disappeared, however, an erasure that was a direct consequence of the industrial and populations boom during the war. Hollywood has retained all of its national and global dominance, but it is no more dominant today than it was in the 195os, or perhaps even the 192os. What pa.s.sed, if glacially, was the white dominance that had marked the Pacific states for the previous century.

The war also brought smog, ugly subdivisions, metastasizing traffic, and a variety of other daily aggravations, but California (and all the western states) remained vastly underpopulated, a virgin land still-a marvelous comparative advantage owing to the Pacific Coast's "late" arrival to the modern world. Simone de Beauvoir was one of many European intellectuals to visit or live in California in the 1940s and come away disconcerted-and impressed. More adventuresome than her New York intellectual friends (none of whom "had ever set foot in California"), she motored along the Pacific coast in 1947 and later wrote: "Despite its sprawling cities, its factories, its mechanized civilization, this country remains the most unspoiled in the world. Man with all his works is a new and sporadic phenomenon here, whose laborious efforts merely scratch the surface of the earth's crust." (About 9 million people lived in California then; today there are 35 million.) She also noted California's "economic autonomy" (although not how recent it was) and found a "heartstopping" difference between Los Angeles and the city by the bay: San Fran Cisco was "a city that hasn't just capriciously risen from the ground but has been built and whose architecture is part of a great natural design."3 A mult.i.tude of Americans continued to seek these open s.p.a.ces, and California just kept on adding people, growing at many times the national rate.

The number of migrants "voting with their wheels" during and after the war is simply staggering. California grew from 6,907,000 in 1940 to 10,586,000 in 1950 and nearly doubled again by 1962, when for the first time it topped New York as the most populous state. Obvious to any attentive demographer, this growth still came as a stunning surprise to specialists "back East."4 During the 195os the country's population increased by 26 percent; Los Angeles grew by 54 percent, San Diego by 86 percent, Sacramento by 81 percent, and San Jose by a whopping 121 percent. Meanwhile San Francisco remained below the national average growth of 26 percent, Portland was well below it (17 percent), and Seattle was only a bit above it, fueled mainly by Boeing which reached a peak of employment in 1958 at 73,000 (before B-52 bomber production got sent to Wichita for defense "dispersal"). Lakewood, the sprawling tract of 17,50o homes and a 250-acre shopping mall that pictured the American future, opened next to the McDonnell Douglas plant built during World War II; the first homes got gobbled up just as NSC-68 went to Truman for his signature in April 1950. Bigger in scale even than Levittown on Long Island, it was the combined product of state-funded mortgages through the GI Bill, jobs created by vast new increases in defense spending, and mult.i.tudes of incoming migrants. From the era of citrus, lima beans, and tent revivals circa 1941, with a mere 114,000 people, Orange County grew almost i,ooo percent by 1970 and then simply continued, adding another million residents between 197o and 1990. It's never really had a city, but five urban-suburban agglomerations dominate it: with around ioo,ooo people each in 1970, they have grown rapidly: Anaheim (332,361 in 2003), Santa Ana (342,510), Garden Grove (167,029), Huntington Beach (194,248), plus the Irvine ranch, which became the planned community of Irvine, with more than ioo,ooo residents today. All over Southern California real estate developers rolled up the orange groves like a tattered and worn carpet, but this protean county dwarfed any other comparison.'

Only one new cutting-edge industry emerged in the postwar period with no clear relations.h.i.+p to federal spending: television was invented in San Francisco in the i92os but did not catch on until after the war-and it caught on first in Los Angeles. It grew on Hollywood's shoulders, but it grew much too fast, terrifying the industry. With three decades of movie industry experience behind it, Los Angeles was poised to capture this new industry, but at the potential price of destroying Hollywood cinema. There were 6,5oo television sets in 1945, more than a million in 1948, more than i1 million by i950- and then the industry quickly expanded over the next decade to inhabit almost every home. Movie attendance dropped from 8o million a week in 1946 (only a bit higher than the 1929 figure) to 6o million in 195o and kept dropping. While New York pioneered first-rate drama (Playhouse go), highbrow talk shows (Edward R. Murrow), cultural programming (Omnibus) and live, intelligent comedy (The Sid Caesar Show), Los Angeles plastered the market with low-brow game shows, sitcoms, westerns (Gunsmoke), family soap operas (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) and kiddy shows (Howdy Doody), many of them produced in Hollywood studios with cla.s.sic "Bmovie" haste and mediocrity.

California population, 1900-2000 (in thousands). United States Census Bureau, California Department of Finance.

The mythic West may have disappeared, but it had a rapid recrudescence on TV. By the late i95os Hollywood turned out a western every week and fully thirty prime-time TV shows were westerns, including eight of the ten most popular. Pollsters found that Hollywood cowboy and war films made many Americans believe that John Wayne really drove longhorns and fought at Iwo Jima, that Frank Sinatra got strafed at Pearl Harbor, and that Humphrey Bogart was a reluctant resistance fighter. Ronald Reagan flourished in this milieu, selling zo Mule-Team Borax and General Electric, helping to build and solidify a "conservative cultural hegemony."6 That the vintage New York programming now seems lost in the Pleistocene era of television merely underlines the ma.s.sive victory that Los Angeles won. And now the mythic West entered everyone's living room, every evening.

The one economic phenomenon that would amaze a Californian in 195o is Silicon Valley, which merits a separate chapter. But even the valley had its origins in the government-business-university nexus, and its most cherished conceit-the brilliant inventor puttering around his garage-has its counterpart in Jack Parsons's "suicide squad" and Lockheed's Skunk Works (see below). The one political phenomenon that would flabbergast a Carey McWilliams was a minority fundamentalist and conservative tendency, homegrown in the orange groves, that grew systematically until i98o, when it became a major national movement. Two other postwar tendencies are noteworthy and underappreciated: first, the incalculable importance of federal spending in the Pacific states, and second, the rise of western Republican leaders. If the state sponsored great waterworks in the 193os and a worldbeating military machine in the 1940s, both forces shaped the postwar Pacific -but defense dollars far more than the empire of water. The early i95os also saw the transformation of the historic foreign policy stance of the Republican Party and the rise of western politicians who could win national office. As westerners transformed this party, they slowly transformed the country as a whole, and its relations.h.i.+p to the world.

The Transformative Korean War.

The industrial explosion during World War II prompted widespread fears of a depression after it ended: what was to be done with the millions of workers and newcomers? Who would buy all the goods and services that the war had geared up? All through the Pacific states, V -J Day signified a great victory and the sound of factory gates closing. In 1943, 65,ooo people, 40 percent of them women, worked for Convair. Within a month of Hirohito's capitulation, it had 8,5oo workers. The aircraft industry, so important to Southern California and Seattle, was particularly threatened because it got so big during the war but lacked a clear purpose after it, with commercial air travel still in its infancy. "In 1949 the Los Angeles export economy was probably at its nadir," Jane Jacobs wrote, "perhaps lower than at any time since the Great Depression." Harry Truman presided over a vast demobilization of the military and the wartime military-industrial complex. In 1945 the navy, favored under Roosevelt for four terms, had 3.4 million officers and men and nearly i,ooo s.h.i.+ps of all kinds; fifteen months later it had 491,663 men and just over 300 s.h.i.+ps.' It was as if the country were returning to the normalcy of a small standing army and hemispheric isolation. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan ended that idle dream in 1947, but Truman and his advisors still did not have the money to fund a far-flung defense effort. Until 1950 the containment doctrine approximated what its author, George F. Kerman, wanted it to be: a limited, focused, sober effort relying mostly on diplomatic and economic measures to revive Western European and j.a.panese industry and keep the Russians at bay. The defense budget was steady-state in the late 1940s, hovering around $13 billion.

A young and unknown man named Kim Il Sung ended all that by sending several infantry divisions plunging across the 38th parallel in June 1950, a line drawn by Dean Rusk and a colleague the day after Nagasaki was obliterated. They heedlessly divided a country that had been united for more than a millennium, but few people outside Korea cared about that and barely a single American, in the CIA or anywhere else, knew much about General Kim. All through the 193os he had led guerrillas in Manchuria, fighting against troops led by General Tojo Hideki among others, but this was a remote and unknown pocket of the struggle against j.a.panese imperialism. Likewise Kim had never been farther west than Moscow and could not have known that his attack would solve a huge problem for Dean Acheson, Truman's secretary of state: how to get Congress to fund NSC-68, which called for a tripling of defense expenditures. The Korean War was a blind clash of armies ignorant of each other, fighting for murky and incommensurable goals, but it set the United States on a path of permanent armament. Six months into the war authorized defense spending had gone from $13 billion to $54 billion (over $65o billion in current dollars), the highest figure during the entire cold war. "Korea came along and saved us" was Acheson's epitaph for this war. A conflict that remains mostly forgotten or unknown in the United States, embodying an obscure Korean struggle that began in the 193os and continues today, it was not the cause but the occasion for a new relations.h.i.+p between America and the world.'

California's defense industries hardly knew that Kim Il Sung would come along and save them either, but he inadvertently rescued a bunch of big-ticket projects in Southern California: "strategic bombers, supercarriers, and ... a previously cancelled Convair contract to develop an intercontinental rocket for the Air Force," in Mike Davis's words. By 1952 the aircraft industry was booming again. Los Angeles County had 16o,ooo people employed in aircraft production, compared to 31,000 in Hollywood. In the mid-fifties defense and aeros.p.a.ce accounted directly or indirectly for 55 percent of employment in the county, and almost as much in San Diego (where nearly 8o percent of all manufacturing was related to national defense). "Airminded- ness" was again a slogan: planes migrated through "an ocean of air" in every direction, and Los Angeles sat at the center.9 Center of what? Whatever you might come up with: the coast, the nation, the continent, the Pacific Rim, the Orient, the world. California was always the land of cla.s.sic high-tech, "late" industries, but airpower had myriad spinoffs and forward linkages to commercial aviation (just getting off the ground in the 1950s), rocketry, satellites, electronics and electronic warfare, light metal production (aluminum, magnesium), computer software, and ultimately the Silicon Valley boom of the 199os. By the 1970s fully 10,000 Southern California factories serviced the aeros.p.a.ce industry, suggesting that aeros.p.a.ce is something of a misnomer: many firms got into every kind of civic and social problem, from transportation systems (North American) to information systems (Lockheed), waste management (Aerojet General), air pollution, health care, and crime (TRW). The prototype for this is of course the RAND Corporation, the think tank set up by the air force in Santa Monica that studies anything and everything, from war gaming to school desegregation to urban housing.10 Population change in five California counties, 1940-2000. United States Census Bureau, California Department of Finance.

Since 1950 the Pacific states and the Southwest have consistently outstripped the rest of the country in defense contracts, including New York and New England, the only other seriously competing region. During World War II and Korea, California ranked third in prime contracts after New York and Michigan, but by 1958 it was first, with 21.4 percent of all contracts; New York had 11.6 percent, but when Texas (6.9 percent) and Was.h.i.+ngton (5.8 percent) are added, the Pacific states and Texas had more than a third of all prime contracts. They still had 32 percent in 1977, until the Reagan buildup directed some spending to Connecticut (5.7 percent) and Ma.s.sachusetts (5.1 percent); still, in per capita terms the Pacific states got more than three times the national average. Both coasts get the lion's share of all defense dollars, as if the Pentagon had a spending pattern that mimicked its Atlantic and Pacific strategies. California got $5.8 billion in defense contracts in 1963 and $26 billion two decades later; Texas got $1.2 billion in 1963 and $8.2 billion two decades later; Was.h.i.+ngton went from Si billion to nearly $4 billion; only bucolic Oregon dropped off the map, with a mere $181 million in 1983. During the years of apparent American decline from 1972 to 1986, manufacturing jobs fell by 28 percent in Illinois, 27 percent in Pennsylvania, and 18 percent in Ohio; they expanded by 34 percent in California, 35 percent in Was.h.i.+ngton, and 30 percent in Texas, helped along by defense spending. In research and development California got an amazing 41 percent of all contracts issued between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Reagan buildup, not a minor matter since more than two-thirds of American research and development (R & D) is subsidized by the government, thus perpetuating "the conditions of a youthful, innovative industry" because costs and market compet.i.tion are much less important than developing the latest technologies, which of course means small-volume production.11 In short, since 1941 the federal government has never stopped subsidizing and stimulating the high-tech industries of the Pacific Coast. They seem to be everywhere, from the epicenter of Silicon Valley to Berkeley and Liver more Laboratory, down through "Aeros.p.a.ce Alley" ("the greatest concentration of ultra-high-tech weapon-making capacity in the world") stretching from the site of the original World War II aircraft firms near Los Angeles Airport south through Inglewood, Torrance, Long Beach, and into Orange County-great firms like Lockheed, TRW, Hughes, McDonnell Douglas, and Rockwell powered a continuous military-industrial complex from the Korean War down to the end of the cold war (and Lockheed Martin remained the world's largest arms manufacturer in 2002).12 The war with j.a.pan and the revolutions in China, Korea, and Vietnam that followed it muted West Coast perceptions of the China market and Pacific trade for a generation. After the onset of export-led development in j.a.pan, South Korea, and Taiwan, however, politicians and businessmen dusted off the discourse that began in the days of Manifest Destiny a century earlier: "The center for economic and cultural activity used to be Europe," a San Diego banker and advisor to Governor Jerry Brown announced in 1976, "but now the center of gravity is changing. You have ma.s.ses of people in China; the industrial power of j.a.pan. There are new markets, powerful nations there." Jerry Brown went him one better: even the sun, he thought, was now rising in the west (economically speaking). Meanwhile the oracular governor made a virtue of his eccentricities by visiting a Zen monastery during a trip to j.a.pan in 1977, proclaiming himself enthralled with j.a.panese culture and industrial prowess; his princ.i.p.al trade advisor, d.i.c.k King, said he wanted to sign California up with other Pacific "nations" in a new, j.a.pan-led Co-Prosperity Sphere.13 By 1980 two-thirds of California's exports went to Asian destinations, and American trade with Asia eclipsed that with Europe. But that was just a beginning; today East Asian and Pacific nations, and especially China and the United States, are the prime movers of the world economy.

Still, this was a predictable follow-on to the wartime transformations on the West Coast. Equally predictable and obvious on the face of it, but rarely given its due, was the materialization of national leaders out of the West. Entirely unexpected, however, was the emergence-in the midst of the postwar boom, with the orange groves fading into memory-of a new Republicanism and a conservative American creed that eventually created a "red state" coalition that hoped to dominate the early decades of the twenty-first century.

The Rise of Western Republicanism.

Richard Milhous Nixon was the first western Republican to become a national leader and to bridge the differences between eastern and western Republicanism. He was born, raised, educated, and buried in Orange County, under the "haze of sun leaf-sieved into lemons on Leffingwell's ranch, oranges on the Murphy ranch, and-between the two ... the Nixon grocery store" (in Garry Wills's words).14 From the pinched Protestant lower middle cla.s.s (in his case pinched Quaker shopkeepers), he came up on his own: a scholars.h.i.+p at Whittier College, law school at Duke, and no wealth beyond his (substantial) poker winnings in the navy. Some Orange County millionaires picked him to run against Jerry Voorhis in 1946 (a New Deal liberal and the very model for Mr. Smith Goes to Was.h.i.+ngton), and Nixon won; two years later he became a national figure in the investigation of Alger Hiss, and then defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas for an open Senate seat in 1950 to become Eisenhower's choice for vice president at the 1952 convention. A Connecticut Yankee like George H. W. Bush in H. L. Hunt's court was clearly an imposter, but a Nixon who could bring in the enormous electoral clout of California was something else. (The Bush dynasty, of course, had something Nixon never had-and never would have: central standing in the eastern wing of the party and its epicenters, Wall Street, Yale, and Greenwich.) Nixon was young and ambitious just when the Republicans deployed an ideological bugaboo to hide their basic nature as the party of business: anticommunism. This was nothing new, of course; Republicans a.s.sailed Roosevelt throughout the Depression as a socialist or crypto-communist, and a conservative publication like the National Republic (neither the National Review nor the New Republic), founded in 1928 on principles of anticommunism and unrestrained American nationalism, ill.u.s.trated this. What was new was the vast power of the Soviet Union, ostensibly exercised from Murmansk to Tirana and from Berlin to Beijing. Furthermore, in the 1930s the United States was not the Hartzian "born free" country of its dreams. The Depression created a strong Left and sharp cla.s.s conflict, and labor conquered the open shop almost everywhere except the South-and even in Los Angeles. The full employment and unprecedented prosperity of the 1940s left labor much less militant than in the 193os, however, and cut the slats out from under one progressive party or movement after another. Nixon thus rose up in 1948, in the inquisition of Alger Hiss, to slay a dragon that was already faltering-which made his task all the easier. More than anyone else, including Joe McCarthy, Nixon showed how to climb to power by clubbing the American Left and its serial "vanis.h.i.+ng moments."

Jerry Voorhis was a sublime individual who represented a fading politics: the genteel, orange-grove-shaded, high-minded progressivism of Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, and Pasadena. He had also challenged big business (as every liberal activist did in the 193os), especially the oil firms who enjoyed a free field in California for their exploitation of nature's inheritance. Richard Nixon was set in motion in 1946 by the same people whom Voorhis attackedoil men, insurance bigwigs, bankers. Nixon charged Voorhis with a "Socialistic and Communistic" voting record in Congress, and in the days before the election voters got anonymous phone calls: "Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?" In this way Nixon defeated one of the most popular politicians in California, who never knew what hit him; a year later he was still reeling from Nixon's campaign blitzkrieg."

Helen Gahagan Douglas combined everything that the right wing hated about Hollywood: She was a stunning beauty. She was well born. She was rich. She was cultured and highly intelligent. She was articulate and effective, with patrician carriage and voice. She was liberal. At her hillside home on Senalda Road above the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles spreading out below, she lived a lifestyle like Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown-cooks, servants, swimming pool, two Cadillacs. This formidable woman frightened men: or at least she scared Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W., who in a moment of singular candor admitted that he was "afraid of women who are pithy and sharp and sarcastic at times." Ms. Douglas made the mistake of caring about people less fortunate than herself; a principled liberal and early feminist, her role model was Eleanor Roosevelt. She won her congressional seat in 1944 by renting an apartment in South Central L.A. so she could represent blacks, Hispanics, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, poor people in slums. She was the first white congressperson to hire a black secretary. The obvious conclusion: she must be a Red, a "pink lady," an uppity woman who needed a real man "to slap her around a bit" (according to the leading political writer of the Los Angeles Times).16 Douglas had a permanent lock on her congressional seat, but in 1950 she chose to run for the Senate: so did Nixon. His campaign relied on Murray Chotiner, a ruthless but effective political operative; Herb Klein, a reporter; John Erlichman, a recent graduate of UCLA; and H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, heir to a substantial fortune. Behind Nixon stood a full panoply of Southern California wealth. A "Committee of Twenty" businessmen created a secret political fund for his use; a river of oil money sloshed into his campaign, since Douglas had opposed bills favoring big oil; Rexall Drug president Justin Dart (later a big backer of Ronald Reagan) also funded his campaign, as did Dean Witter (stockbroker), W. W. Crocker (banker), Harry Haldeman (millionaire car dealer), Robert Di Georgio (from California's "fruit king" family), and Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer. The oil barons of the Texas right wing also kicked into the campaign-H. L. Hunt, Hugh Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison.

Nixon toured up and down the state in a yellow 1949 Mercury station wagon (a "woody") and his campaign brought to bear every political smear yet invented, plus some new ones. Chotiner cribbed and cut Douglas's public statements to put slanders in her mouth and scripted editorials against her for the use of a host of newspapers: Helen Gahagan Douglas was plotting to overthrow the government. She was responsible for the war in Korea. She wanted to give away atomic secrets. She liked Negroes too much. She was pink, "Red hot," procommunist, maybe a communist ("Don't vote the Red ticket! Vote the red, white and blue ticket!"). On the eve of the election, the anonymous phone calls came again: "Did you know Douglas is a Communist?" It was a savage, vicious political campaign but it worked: Nixon won an overwhelming victory-nearly 6o percent of the vote to her 40 percent. What he lost was the possibility that any future opponent would ever respect him. A few days after his victory Nixon was dining at columnist Joseph Alsop's home: in walked Averell Harriman, who had campaigned for Douglas: "I will not break bread with that man," he said, and walked out the door.17 All this proved to be a grand success throughout his career and a gift to many other Republican candidates, until he immolated himself in the Watergate scandal.

Apart from Joe McCarthy, no politician was more excoriated in the liberal press and the liberal establishment. The great cartoonist Herblock spilled lots of black ink sketching in the bucket of mud Nixon swung around, and his swarthy five o'clock shadow (merely one of the shadows that famously undid him in the first televised presidential debates in the 1960 campaign). John F. Kennedy was the very embodiment of the genteel tradition (never mind that he was an Irish Catholic)-suave, handsome, rich, slim, athletic, a Harvard degree, an intelligent, articulate, and humorous politician whom the camera loved-and the TV camera was now the dominant media force in American politics. So it is hard to remember that Nixon nearly won the election. Afterward he retreated to California, ran for governor in 1962 and lost, and then announced his political obituary-the liberal press "won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." But of course Nixon made another of his patented comebacks, and so they got to kick him around for at least another decade.

Nixon's critical step was to reverse the enormous population movement to California and migrate instead to New York. There in the mid-196os he cultivated Wall Street contacts, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, and a host of other Atlanticist outlets, and made peace with Nelson Rockefeller and many others in the eastern wing of the party. Nixon polished his internationalist credentials by drawing close to Harvard's Henry Kissinger, Rockefeller's key foreign policy advisor. Nixon turned his back on Orange County fantasies about the American role in the world (which he never believed in the first place) and instead told Kissinger that he wanted to open up Communist China. This stunning demarche has now become a cliche for politicians changing their color ("Nixon goes to China"), but the records of the National Security Council in the i95os show that Nixon had an excellent foreign policy mind. Council meetings went on for hours, and many of Nixon's later policies are prefigured in his astute comments, including bringing China out of its isolation.18 A Critical Election.

If the opening to China reorganized the Pacific, with consequences still unfolding before our eyes, Nixon also helped to change his political party and its relations.h.i.+p to the world at large. The early postwar period was transformative not just of the American state and its relation to the world, but of partisan politics in the United States. The principled fiscal conservatism of the Taft wing of the Republican Party gave way to an uneasy coalition between eastern Republicans (e.g., the Dulles brothers and Nelson Rockefeller) and a newly rising western Republicanism (Nixon, Goldwater, Reagan) that had a large hole in its fiscal theory, caused by immense defense spending that founded one western industry after another. In the i95os and r96os the eastern wing was dominant, in part because it came together in the middle of the political spectrum with internationalist Democrats. But the subsequent rise of western Republicanism is inexplicable apart from the history of American national security since 1941 and the deluge of federal spending that it brought.

Nixon demonstrated twice that a California politician could win the presidency, but 1952 was more important than his victories in 1968 or 1972. Eisenhower and Nixon were both clearly of the West: Eisenhower, born in Denison, Texas (oil country) and reared in the railhead junction at the end of the Chisholm Trail, Abilene; Nixon, born in a small town in the northeast corner of Orange County (Yorba Linda). The 1952 election was not about splits between the eastern and western wings of the party, of course; Eisenhower might well have run as a Democrat, and anyway Republicans were ready for anybody but a pale, ineffective, even effete easterner like Thomas Dewey (who had lost in 1944 and 1948). What was important about 1952 is what evaporated then, never to return: Taftism in the Midwest and elsewhere, combining westward-leaning, nationalist, and isolationist const.i.tuencies with a principled position on federal spending, including a limited defense budget. Spending had quadrupled under Truman and was the fuel for a huge standing army, a national security state, and a ma.s.sive militaryindustrial complex. At $5o billion (the 1952 figure), defense was over 5o percent of the federal budget; meanwhile the entire federal expenditure from 1787 to 1917 had been a bit under $3o billion.19 Senator Robert A. Taft had 500 delegates locked up by the time he got to the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago, but a well-oiled Eisenhower campaign a.s.sured that he got no more: Ike took 595 delegates to Taft's 5O0 before states started switching to give Eisenhower a landslide.20 Taft was dominant through the middle of the continent but fatally weak on the coasts.

Taft was primarily a conservative champion of small and medium business and an opponent of federal spending and regulation (although he supported federal education, housing and health programs). Highly intelligent and respected for his integrity, he was never terribly interested in foreign affairs (like most of his countrymen) but nonetheless embodied principles that went back to Was.h.i.+ngton's Farewell Address. He consistently argued that American security could never be fully guaranteed and that to seek this would end up creating a garrison state and a permanent war economy. European quarrels would never end; the United States should stay out of them. America was isolated by geography, even in the age of airpower, and that was a good thing. A seventy-group air force, a formidable navy that did not duplicate the air force's strategic mission, and a small atomic a.r.s.enal would provide a sufficient and relatively inexpensive defense, he thought; a large standing army was anathema to the American experience, but the navy had a venerable tradition and airpower was a high-technology gift that would allow America to stand apart from Europe, as it always had. It might once have been the case that foreign enemies would take a modestly armed America lightly, Taft believed, but the spectacle of an immensely productive power creating a world-beating military machine in a matter of months after Pearl Harbor would not be lost on anyone.21 It is, of course, impossible to imagine what a president like Bob Taft would have done about the wars in Korea and Vietnam, or the challenge from the Soviet Union and China. The point is that his voice was stilled, and that voice was as old as the United States itself, had been dominant just a decade earlier, and reached a particular height of sophistication in the work-the very popular work-of historian Charles Beard. In 1952 a large Republican const.i.tuency was cut adrift from its own history and never found a coherent stance on America's relations.h.i.+p to the world thereafter. For the next half-century a bipartisan internationalist coalition, committed to the cold war and high defense budgets, dominated American foreign policy, and almost anyone who dissented seriously from their basic tenets was tarred with the brush of isolationism, pro-communism, or simply Neanderthal thinking. Cranks like Patrick Buchanan and Ross Perot sought to appeal to Taft's historic const.i.tuency on foreign policy grounds in the 199os, with Buchanan harking back to 1930s nationalist themes and getting nowhere, while Perot (a know-nothing on world affairs) was instrumental in handing the White House to Clinton in 1992. His "big sucking sound" (jobs going to Mexico or China) now has an important const.i.tuency, but this borderline southerner/Texan from Texarkana could never be elected president. But after 1952 Americans had no trouble electing westerners.

General Eisenhower came from Abilene, firmly in the mythic West; he won two terms. Richard Nixon was a Southern Californian with a new strategy-to join the western and southwestern Sunbelt to the Deep South; he also won two terms (even if he squandered the second one). Ronald Reagan was another Southern Californian but also an iconic celluloid cowboy: he won two terms. George H. W. Bush lived in Texas, worked in the oil industry, and occasionally wore a cowboy hat. But no one mistook him for a Texan; good breeding in his home town of Greenwich, Connecticut, got much too far under his skin. He merited only one term. Along comes the son, George W. Bush, a Texan through and through (no doubt to the consternation of his aristocratic parents): two terms.

The rise of western politicians thus makes the 1952 election a critical one. It realigned the outward stance of the Republican Party, silencing the foreign policy positions of a huge midwestern and western const.i.tuency (because of cotton the South was part of the free trade coalition, and was in any case solidly Democratic until a different issue appeared and realigned it-race and civil rights). More broadly, 1952 realigned both parties regarding the new-new thing that came along in World War II, the military-industrial complex. After a brief decline, the Korean War revived the military-industrial coalition, led to historically unprecedented peacetime defense budgets and a large standing army, and turned the host of new industries that got going under Roosevelt-primarily ones in the West, and especially California-into permanent inst.i.tutions. These enormously influential forces were supported thereafter on an entirely bipartisan basis: to champion serious cuts in the defense budget was (and still is) a ticket to political oblivion.

The year 1952 simultaneously involved the silencing of a principled Republican fiscal conservatism, the rise of western Republicans of national stature, the emergence of a bipartisan cold war coalition that put serious cuts in defense spending out of the question for the long term, and the emergence of a Democratic Party forced to play a weak foreign policy hand in which it could easily be trumped: as "soft on communism," "weak on defense," unable to conclude wars that they got the country into (Korea and Vietnam), or afraid to run risks like opening relations with China (Kennedy wanted to, but Nixon did it). The Republicans have never stopped playing the defense and security card, while never acknowledging the major hole in their theory of a minimal state (or small federal government) caused by ma.s.sive defense spending. Barry Goldwater was the Republican most ideologically committed to minimalism and general hatred of federal programs, but that never stopped him from championing another air base or defense factory for Arizona. Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush were more characteristic, though, in presiding over enormous hemorrhages of defense dollars while pretending to be opponents of federal spending. Nixon was truly a Keynesian in his expansion of all kinds of federal programs, including a big boost to environmentalism; ma.s.sive increases in defense spending were unlikely as the Vietnam War wound down, and detente with the Soviet momentarily slowed the arms race. Reagan, however, quickly boosted defense spending over $450 billion in current dollars, and Bush's "war on terror," combining wars abroad and "homeland security," pushed it past the $65o billion mark in 2oo6. They were military Keynesians, like Truman and Acheson.

Walter Dean Burnham's "ideal typical" realigning election involves, first, "short-lived but very intense disruptions of traditional patterns of voting behavior." Majority parties become minorities and large blocks of the electorate s.h.i.+ft their allegiances. Second, these elections show "abnormally high intensity," which spills over into party nominations, ideological polarization (within or between parties), "highly salient issue-cl.u.s.ters," and usually, high voter turnout. Burnham also found a uniform periodicity-the Republican ascendancy after 1896, the New Deal in 1932, establis.h.i.+ng a new and durable Democratic coalition, or Nixon and Reagan doing the same by exploiting a "southern strategy" that demolished Democratic Party hegemony in the South.22 The election of 1952 was not particularly intense, but the fight between Taft and Eisenhower supporters was very intense. Even so, extinguis.h.i.+ng the foreign policy voice that Taft represented did not send a lot of Republicans scampering into the Democratic Party (in fact they had nowhere to go), and the defense budget was not a highly salient issue because of the Korean War and the widespread perception of a dire Soviet threat. Voter turnout at 76 percent was the highest in the 195os and back to 1936, but the turnout for the 1960 election was about the same. Eisenhower was an essentially nonpartisan figure, a war hero of indeterminate politics presiding affably over a boom economy; Stalin died and the Korean War ended within months of his inauguration, which also made foreign policy less salient. But when you see the vehemence with which his treasury secretary, George M. Humphrey, intervened time and again in NSC meetings to demand sharp reductions in defense spending (getting little satisfaction),23 you see the critical issue of fiscal conservatism disappearing in Senator Taft's rearview mirror.

The realignment that began in 1952 was of a different, less easily specifiable quality than Burnham's conception, more along the lines of V. O. Key's cla.s.sic formulation of a realignment that "seems to persist for several succeeding elections," in this case a new foreign stance that slowly but surely eliminated Taft's ideas and his national standing. We see it best in C. Wright Mills's portrait in 1956 of "the perfect candidate" for the presidency-a man born on a modest farm in Ohio, law degree, Rotary Club stalwart, Episcopalian: William Howard Taft, in other words. But his son Bob Taft? No Ohioan has gotten anywhere near the presidency in the half-century since Mills wrote that, but many had before.24 And we see it in the seamless bipartisan backing for the Pentagon and its archipelago of empire ever since.

The 1952 departure is still underappreciated, to say the least. Aristide Zolberg recently wrote that the "imperial transformation" and the rise of the national security state in the early postwar years "did not affect the components of the political process most grounded in American society, that is, parties and interest groups." David R. Mayhew criticizes the literature on realigning elections, but when he gets to the period 1948-72 there is no mention of the West, the rise of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and least of all the attacks that western, conservative Republicans launched on the eastern wing of the party, especially against Nelson Rockefeller. He argues that 1948 through 1956 may const.i.tute an important "juncture" if not a realignment, but unmentioned is the Korean War, the permanent national security state, or the evaporation of Taft and the isolationists after 1952.21 The election of 1952 realigned the historic Republican relations.h.i.+p to the world, but not domestic policy (where the terrain of conflict was race and the New Deal legacy). It shaped a politics in which no Democrat won two terms for half a century, until Clinton's victory in 1996. Truman had the right to run again in 1952 but chose not to because the highly unpopular Korean War had "demolished" his administration, in the words of Dean Acheson. John Kennedy won a close election in 1960 but was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 1963. The next year Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, cleaned the clock of another westerner, Barry Goldwater. But he also chose not to run again because the Vietnam War was demolis.h.i.+ng his administration in 1968. Jimmy Carter, a southerner, defeated Gerald Ford in 1976, a victory shaped primarily by the debacle of Watergate and Nixon's disgrace. Ronald Reagan booted him out in a landslide in 1980. George H. W. Bush might be a counterfeit Texan, but by 1988 he did not represent the old eastern wing of the Republican Party-he rode to victory on the back of Ronald Reagan's mastery of American politics and an appallingly inept Democratic campaign. Bill Clinton, another southerner, won in 1992 and 1996: the first Democrat since Roosevelt to be reelected. Al Gore-yet another southerner-won the popular vote in 2000 but not the Electoral College. John Kerry, from the Northeast, needed about 70,000 more votes in Ohio to win the Electoral College in 2004 but lost the popular vote by more than one and a half million. Republicans were the dominant force in presidential elections from 1952 until 2008-all of them westerners, and all but one of them (Goldwater) a victor.

An Orange-and a Red-County.

In spite of an enormous influx of new residents, Southern California has had a conservative and usually Republican tendency from the 189os down to the present. It has far more displaced midwestern Protestants-Taft flatlandersthan northern California, which attracted many immigrant Catholics (and always had a strong labor movement). But in the region, Orange County's conservatism has been the most intense. Orange County went for Roosevelt twice, in 1932 and 1936-an aberration brought on by the Depression-and never again voted Democratic. This brand of Republicanism had an important impact in the rise of Richard Nixon, but it never had a national impact before the Goldwater campaign. Even then, Orange County only gave 56 percent to Goldwater, while giving 72 percent to Reagan in 1966 (in the governor's race) and 63 percent to Nixon in 1968. Thus its significance in 1964 was primarily negative: it helped Goldwater get nominated, but the prominence of the John Birch Society, Knott's Berry Farm, and other forms of extremism in the campaign killed Goldwater's chances in the general election.

With the New Deal coalition still intact nationally, the Great Society being born, and liberals still self-confident, it was child's play to tar Goldwater (a cla.s.sic western politician) as an extremist-and to do so was entirely mainstream: in its Republican convention issue, Newsweek pictured Goldwater on the cover in a pose recalling Hitler. The critical moment at the convention was the booing and shouting down of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a harbinger of the decline of the Wall Street internationalism and the modest liberalism that had long characterized the eastern wing of the party. Still, Orange County extremism seemed to epitomize everything that sent Goldwater and the party down to a crus.h.i.+ng defeat. Its domestic mantras a.s.saulted reigning New Deal verities, and it completely lacked a serious philosophy of foreign affairs: Birch Society conspiracy theories bespoke a catastrophic flatlander inability to understand a world entirely recalcitrant to their imaginings.

About America they knew more, but all of their pitches were to white men of a certain cla.s.s and a certain removal from midwestern verities-or to women who would stand up and say, I will stay in the kitchen (in her long career Phyllis Schlafly epitomized this appeal). Orange grove conservatism, honed over decades before the war, might explain this political phenomenon. But Knott's theme park probably gets us closer, because conservatism ripened in the quarter-century after 1945 just as the groves dwindled, washed away in an ocean of concrete. The machine of suburbanization ate through them just like Chicago ate up Frederick Jackson Turner's Arcadia, leaving only the option of grasping one's fond hopes and ideals more tightly to the bosom with his "faith and courage, and creative zeal"-in this case recuperating and preserving, like Knott's boysenberry jam, the evaporated aura of gentlemen in cravat and bowler inspecting the thin skins and thick albedos of cadmiumbright citrus. Then something happened that might suggest that no one ever goes broke in America by invoking lost pasts.

Within a short few years Kevin Phillips had detected the beginnings of middle-cla.s.s revolt in "the Sun country, and Southern California in particu lar' ; Nixon's vaunted and highly effective "Southern strategy" was equally a southwestern strategy, returning to his root politics in Orange County. The civil rights movement and the extraordinary turmoil of urban ghettos in the late i96os enabled the party of Lincoln to turn toward open-more often subliminal-appeals to frightened whites, then cascading into new suburbs for which lily-white Orange County provided a perfect model: never really urban, it became an instant symbol of postwar suburbanization. Indeed, the first gated community in the country opened there in i96o, with an all too literal name-the "Walled City of Rossmoor." Soon they covered Southern California like the orange groves once did and spread across the nation-and now private security forces vastly outnumber the official police.26 Orange County appeared to reach the apex of its national influence when one of its all-time favorites, Ronald Reagan, was elected president in 1980but that was just the beginning. A westerner like Nixon and Goldwater (although originally a midwesterner, like so many Californians), he won a landslide a mere six years after Nixon resigned in disgrace. Clips from John Wayne films introduced the story of Ronald Reagan's life at the 1984 Republican Convention, and Reagan's second inaugural recalled the Alamo and the pioneers: "A settler pushes west and sings his song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound: It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic-daring, decent and fair."27 Reagan was discovered and hoisted to prominence by Hollywood, living almost all of his adult life in and through the movies, and his ascendancy in the 198os spoke less o