California from Perlstein

 When he
wasn’t on the road for G.E. or on the set, he spread the gospel in front of any
audience that invited him. His family hardly saw him. “The inescapable truth is
that we are at war,” he would say, “and we are losing that war simply because
we don’t or won’t realize we are in it. We have ten years. Not ten years to make
up our mind, but ten years to win or lose—by I970 the world will be all slave
or all free.”
In Orange County that kind of talk was making Reagan a hero. He was like
them—a Midwestem transplant, from small-town Illinois. He almost belonged
more to them than he did to Hollywood.
It was first said in the nineteenth century that Califomia was “America, only
more so.” Orange County was California, only more so. It had been the com-
mandment to Americans after World War II to go forth and multiply. Orange
County listened, and exploded. The govemment said to fight Communism.
Orange County listened, and went berserk.
California had always been a territory of booms and busts. Orange
County’s boom came during World War II. Opening up to the Pacific, pos-
sessed of a mild climate, southem California was the perfect place for defense
installations. As in Phoenix, the aircraft manufacturers followed. Unions were
weak. Venture capital was abundant. And when the jet and missile age arrived
in the 1950s, it turned out that southern Califomia had a competitive advan-
tage: unlike more established companies back East, which preferred safe con-
struction contracts, the tinkerers in Califomia welcomed long-tenn research
and development deals. New York State lost 34 percent of its share of the
Defense Department’s procurement between I950 and I956; by I965 Califor-
nia would have almost a quarter of the Defense Department’s prime contracts
and 41 percent of NASA’s. Aerospace accounted for astaggering 10 percent of
all personal income in the state of Califomia and perhaps a quarter of its eco-
nomic growth. And Orange County, the formerly rural area south of Los’Ange-
les—whose municipalities were so eager to play host to the War Department
that the town of Santa Ana leased the U.S. govemment a 412-acre former berry
ranch for a‘ dollar a year—did best of all. Orange County’s population, 100,000
in I940, approached a million by I960. Washington had called forth a new
suburban civilization in southem California. Orange County was its hub.
Real estate speculators turned ranches into subdivisions virtually over-
night—an entire municipality, Irvine, from a single orange grove. Men who g0i
a taste of the Sunshine State as Pacific Theater veterans flocked back after the
war to settle there with their families; all you had to do was visit a real estate
office af the edge of some fonner citrus grove, point to a site on a tract map,
and lay down a $200 down payment (less if you were a veteran), and you’d
vbgught yourself a house. But with mortgage debt a constant, silent presence,
r-the new homesteaders were not keen on squandering their precious salaries,
their only assets, on high taxes to help out the other guy. In I959 Orange
County congressman James Utt reintroduced an effort to add a “Liberty
XAmendment” to the Constitution-—which would repeal all federal income,
‘estate, and gift taxes and ban all government enterprises that competed with the
private sector. Utt likened the federal government to a “child molester who
offers candy before his evil act.”
Orange County had always been a Republican stronghold. As in the rest of
southem Califomia suburbia, much of the county’s population hailed from
Taft’s Midwest (every year a massive “Iowa Day” celebration was held in
L.A.’s Griffith Park). The first time a Democratic President carried the county
was I932, the last 1936. That was twoitimes too many for Raymond Cyrus
Hoiles, publisher of the Santa Ana Register, who said the world would have
I been better off if Franklin D. Roosevelt had never leamed to read or write.
Hoiles’s editorials railed against the government stake in what he called “tax-
supported schools, roads, and parks”——and called for an end to child labor and
pure food and drug laws. As for the area’s racial attitudes, in I954 a Korean-
‘American Olympic Gold Medal winner was able to purchase a home in Garden
Grove only after an outcry in the international media, and the Magnolia Dis-
trict’s first black teacher was forced to quit after a year when she couldn’t find
housing. Orange County tended to draw people who found such politics ami-
able. Once there, they often moved further to the right.
New postwar migrants, unmoored from the familiar Main Streets of their
youth, burst the churches of conservative preachers like “Fighting Bob” Wells
at the seams. Many were fundamentalists and Evangelicals of a new kind: they
mixed politics with religion, a diversion much more associated with liberal
clergymen.
and
The men who led their families on weekends to Knott’s Berry Farm as if to
secular worship were like Walter Knott’s boysenberries: in a way not quire
apparent to the naked eye, they were welfare cases. Veterans who retumed
home from World War II to a country terrified of sinking back into depression
benefited mightily from federal scheines to boost consumer spending by subsi-
dizing homeownership; before the war, a typical mortgage required a down
payment of 50 percent and came due in ten years; now a mortgage involved a
down payment of IO percent, was financed at 4 percent, lasted three decades,
and was tax deductible—one of the most generous redistributions of wealth in
American history. The irrigation projects that were the lifeline of the arid
region were funded by taxes from the forty-nine other states. People like James
Wallace cursed Washington at John Birch Society meetings after spending
their days inside finns built lock, stock, and barrel with government contracts
and after earning their engineering degrees in Califomia’s tuition-free, state-
run university system, or buying them with GI Bill money. They delighted in
Ronald Reagan’s sparkling professions of free-market faith. But even his faith
had its limits. When Reagan began saying that the Tennessee Valley Authority
drained the U.S. Treasury better than its own basin, he was reminded that G.E.
had a $50 million bid in for TVA generators. Reagan gladly dropped the refer-
ence.