California

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Early-20th-Century Economic Development

During the first three decades of the 20th century, California’s economy and population continued to grow apace. Between 1900 and 1930 the state’s population increased from 1,485,053 to 5,677,251. The rate of growth was most rapid in southern California, especially around Los Angeles. Huge irrigation projects and mechanized farming methods dramatically increased agricultural production.

Industrial production also increased in the same three decades. In 1907 oil surpassed gold as California’s most economically valuable natural resource, and between 1900 and 1936, California became one of the principal oil-producing states in the nation. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 greatly shortened the sea route between California and the East Coast of the United States. At the same time, a deepwater harbor was built at Los Angeles.

In April 1906 San Francisco was seriously damaged by an earthquake, which caused a fire that burned for three days. Most of San Francisco’s downtown and residential areas were destroyed. However, the city was rebuilt quickly, with many improved facilities, including a better port. Many highways were built in California in the 1920s, and a number of automobile-assembly plants were built, primarily near San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the 1920s and 1930s the Los Angeles area became an important center for the U.S. aircraft industry. Also in the 1920s, the new motion-picture industry grew at Hollywood in southern California.

The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed caused high unemployment, many business failures, and farm foreclosures in California throughout the 1930s. The state’s social and economic problems were also aggravated by the influx of thousands of homeless farmers and farm workers from drought-ridden Oklahoma and Arkansas, called Okies and Arkies, as well as emigrants from Kansas, Texas, and other states.

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The economic distress of the 1930s was partially eased by construction on a number of water projects in the state. These included Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam in 1947), Imperial Dam, and Parker Dam, on the lower Colorado River, as well as major canals and aqueducts linking the dams with the Los Angeles area and the Imperial Valley. Work was also begun during the 1930s on a vast project to bring water to the Central Valley.

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World War II and After

During World War II (1939-1945) the demand for war supplies helped the recovery of California’s agricultural, manufacturing, shipbuilding, and lumbering industries. The war in the Pacific also enormously increased the traffic at California’s ports and naval bases and brought thousands of industrial workers to the state’s new aircraft and munitions plants.

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The Japanese in California

Japanese workers had begun immigrating to California in the 1890s and experienced racial discrimination, as had the Chinese before them. In 1906 the San Francisco Board of Education announced that Japanese students would have to attend a Chinese school, which was renamed the Oriental School. President Theodore Roosevelt arranged to have the policy rescinded in exchange for Japanese limits on immigration to the United States. In 1924 Asian immigration was shut off entirely.

As World War II approached, anti-Japanese feelings increased further. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, public groups in California argued that the Japanese should be removed from the state. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which ordered the removal of 112,000 Californians of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, to internment camps in the interior of the United States. After the war, although they were allowed to return, a large number settled in other areas. In 1988 the Congress of the United States passed a bill to compensate those who had been detained.

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Postwar California

California’s varied economy provided its new residents with a personal income substantially above the national average. The decade after the war saw especially rapid urban residential growth. In those ten years, California’s population increased almost 50 percent—from almost 9 million to 13 million. By 1970 the state numbered 19.9 million residents, bypassing New York to become the most populous state.

Earl Warren, a liberal Republican, served as governor for ten years until September 1953, when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1959 Edmund G. Brown, Sr., became the state’s second Democratic governor since 1899. But by 1966 California had become more conservative, and Brown was defeated in his bid for a third term by Republican Ronald Reagan, a former movie actor. Many California voters saw government activity related to social and economic problems as too much interference in the concerns of private individuals. Conservatism in California was especially strong in populous southern California and in rural areas. Reagan, who was reelected governor in 1970, also became a leading spokesman nationwide for conservative issues, and in 1980 was elected president of the United States, defeating Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

Racial politics were also part of the conservative trend. Blacks had migrated to California in large numbers during and after World War II seeking jobs. Their growing resentment against discrimination in housing and labor unions accompanied the destructive August 1965 riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles. These outbreaks helped turn many whites against the policies of Governor Brown. Brown’s administration had cracked down on racial discrimination by employers. In the 1970s many conservative voters also began to resent the large influx into the state of Mexican immigrants, many of them illegal.

Dissident protests took place on California’s college campuses in the late 1960s. Students demonstrated against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975). One major center of public demonstrations was the University of California at Berkeley. The protests alarmed many voters, who generally supported measures to suppress the disturbances and to reduce funds for higher education.

Labor issues also confronted the state in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the important fruit and vegetable industry. During World War II the United States had reached an agreement with Mexico to allow large numbers of workers, called braceros, to work in the United States. They had been joined by illegal immigrants from Mexico who were looking for work. Many of these immigrants became farm workers in California. The United Farm Workers Union, headed by César Chávez, struggled to unionize agricultural laborers, largely Hispanic, despite the determined opposition of farm owners. In 1975 all farm workers were guaranteed the right to collective bargaining by the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, and in 1978 a majority of grape growers, whom the United Farm Workers had been boycotting, signed contracts with the union.

Californians also faced the problem of protecting both their physical resources and their environment. The state’s extraordinary growth in the years after World War II required the development of huge projects to supply residential, agricultural, and industrial water needs, particularly in arid and heavily populated southern California. The exploding population and growing economy also contributed to pollution of the air and of the environment. In the 1950s and 1960s the smog for which Los Angeles had become notorious spread to other urban areas, even to the Central Valley, as well as to Lake Tahoe and Yosemite National Park in the summers. California now began seriously to attack its environmental problems, and in 1976 the legislature created a commission to control development along the coastline.

Reagan was succeeded as governor in 1975 by Democrat Edmund G. Brown, Jr., the son of Reagan’s predecessor. Brown, Jr., also supported government involvement in social and economic activities. His administration supported civil rights legislation, programs to protect the state’s environment, and completion of his father’s huge California Water Project.

But Brown, Jr., also argued that government could only do so much. In 1978 a “taxpayers’ revolt” in California offered Brown, Jr., an opportunity to put his theories of smaller government into practice. The state’s voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment, known as Proposition 13, that severely reduced local property tax rates by more than two-thirds. This amendment created a financial crisis for local governments, and the state legislature was forced to provide emergency aid from the treasury.

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The End of the 20th Century

In the past few decades California has experienced a frenzied building of new freeways, airports, factories, and schools. Smog and traffic congestion have enveloped urban areas and an urban landscape has replaced former vineyards and orange groves. Overcrowding, too, has diminished the allure of California.

Following the Vietnam War, the federal government admitted many Asians from countries like Cambodia and Singapore. In addition, a growing number of legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America have complicated the urban tensions that California already faced.

Pete Wilson was elected governor of California in 1990. A former U.S. senator and a Republican, Wilson faced declining state revenues and serious unemployment problems. These were partly due to the decrease of federal defense spending following the end of the Cold War, the economic and diplomatic struggle between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In addition, new business growth had been affected by more stringent environmental regulations.

Many parts of California were buffeted by serious natural disasters in the late 1980s and 1990s. Earthquakes caused major damage in the San Francisco area in 1989 as well as east of Los Angeles in 1992, and again in the Los Angeles area in 1994. Brush fires destroyed more than 1,000 homes in southern California in 1993. By early 1995 winter storms caused flood damage throughout the state. Extensive flooding and mudslides also resulted from above-average rainfall in the winter of 1998 caused by El Niño, a warming of the atmosphere and oceans that periodically disturbs weather patterns.

Racial tensions also increased in the 1990s. In 1991 white Los Angeles police officers were videotaped while beating a black motorist named Rodney King. When the officers were found not guilty during their criminal trial in 1992, the acquittal set off yet another riot in south-central Los Angeles. Some 58 people were killed and many homes and businesses were destroyed or looted. In April 1993 a court convicted two of the police officers for violating Rodney King’s civil rights.

Also in the 1990s, illegal immigration from Mexico became one of the biggest political issues in California. In 1994 California voters approved the controversial Proposition 187, which was intended to revoke the rights of illegal immigrants to state education, welfare, and health services. The measure caused many Hispanic residents to withdraw their support for the state’s Republican administration, which had led efforts to pass the proposition.

Tensions also increased between California and the Mexican government, and in February 1999 the state’s newly elected Democratic governor, Gray Davis, visited Mexico and began efforts to mend the rift. However, the main provisions of the proposition never took effect. In a series of decisions a U.S. District Court judge overturned major parts of the proposition because the regulation of immigration is a federal rather than a state power. In July 1999 Davis reached an agreement with the opponents of the proposition in which the state ended its appeals of the court rulings and left the main provisions of the proposition overturned.

Racial politics have also affected higher education in California. In the 1970s, under affirmative action policies designed to reflect the state’s ethnic diversity, university administrators devised complex racial preference criteria for each state university campus. While increasing minority representation, the system prevented some top California high school graduates from being admitted. Under the earlier (1978) U.S. Supreme Court decision, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the University of California was prohibited from creating such racial quotas but was permitted to consider race as one factor in admissions policies.

In 1995, however, the University of California Board of Regents turned away from previous admissions policies entirely when it passed a resolution eliminating programs that called for racial and gender preferences in admissions, hiring, and the granting of outside contracts. In 1996 a statewide challenge to affirmative action programs throughout state government was placed on the ballot. California voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, also known as Proposition 209, which ended any preference based on gender, race, or ethnicity for state jobs, state contracts, or admission to state schools.

California voters also passed another statewide ballot measure, Proposition 227, which required the state’s public schools to end most of their bilingual education programs. The proposition, approved in 1998, ordered that schools teach classes primarily in English, but it gave parents the right to seek a waiver from English-only instruction if their children wished to remain in bilingual programs.