Long a magnet for those pursuing the American dream, from the Gold Rush to the golden age of Hollywood, California grew explosively in the Second World War. Government spending for the war created thousands of jobs in a new defense industry and millions migrated to such places as Los Angeles and Oakland. Unlike previous immigration into eastern cities, in California a new type of “centerless city” emerged, creating a new relationship between people and landscape. In the thirty years after the War, areas such as Orange County south of Los Angeles, and Santa Clara County south of San Francisco, went from rural to suburban to “post-suburban” in barely more than a generation. Orange groves and ranches were transformed into industrial parks, malls, subdivisions and the freeways and roads to connect them, first proposed by business leaders in 1942, and underwritten by the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. By 1962, California was the nation’s most populous state.

The growth of California mirrored the general shift in population and power in the US from the Northeast and Midwest rustbelt to the Southern and Western Sunbelt. The shift paralleled the move from the old, industrial economy to the new information-based high-tech economy fostered by defense spending throughout the Cold War, but also increasingly by the high-tech innovations which filtered into the consumer sphere, especially those from an area south of San Francisco named Silicon Valley.

The Cold War brought billions of dollars in government contracts—the money which created jobs. The jobs brought people, who created the need for new houses, schools, roads, sewers and social services. Most importantly the people brought and bought cars, and the cars needed highways. Spreading outward, not upward as eastern cities had done earlier, with bulldozers razing orchards for more houses, offices, shopping malls and factories, these municipalities exacted enormous environmental costs.

Beginning in the immediate postwar period, both international capital and local political and business elites worked to fragment the environmental and social landscapes, most importantly through the proliferation of incorporated municipalities with separate, often separatist, “post-suburban” governmental units. White, middleclass residents in dozens of new outer polities sought, and discovered, methods for avoiding the burdens of urban citizenship (i.e. taxes), while shifting the costs of social services to the poor and people of color. The new, fragmented urbanism relied on growth and racial segregation, both of which would bring disastrous consequences.

The Watts rebellion of 1965 signaled that, despite the continued suburban ideal and the concomitant low-density housing, racial segregation in housing reflected and reinforced inequalities in power, leading to a breakdown of the social contract throughout California. Other developments in the 1960s highlighted major transformations in both the state and the nation. Berkeley’s student-run Free Speech Movement provided the bridge between the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement. The founding of the Black Panthers in Oakland marked a shift from civil rights to Black Power. For the youth counterculture of the 1960s, the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and, especially the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco stood as meccas of free love, hallucinogenic drugs and rock music performed at Be-ins and Love-ins by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and others, culminating in the Summer of Love of 1967 and crashing to a halt with the violence at the Altamont concert in 1969.

Despite the 1960s rebellions, California was more often a force for political conservatism, home to the John Birch Society and two Republican presidents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The reaction to the upheavals of the 1960s came with the “culture of narcissism” of the 1970s, when the personal liberation spirit turned into hedonism with a vogue for designer drugs, hot tubs and cultish, vaguely eastern religions.

Any remnant of countercultural or progressive spirit was overturned as the taxpayer revolt of Proposition 13 enshrined a me-first politics, paving the way for the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. The home-owners’ tax-revolt was hijacked by big business interests which engineered their own tax cuts, thus inaugurating slash-and-burn budget cuts to spending on social services such as schools.

The social and environmental impacts of postwar growth were felt continually by California residents. The folly of speculative post-suburban growth and the irresponsibility and unaccountability to the citizenry of post-suburban government was demonstrated by the bankruptcy of Orange County in the 1990s, the result of speculation in junk bonds.

Racial conflict, too, continued unabated. When, in 1992, four police officers, whom the whole world had seen on videotape savagely beating a traffic violation suspect, were acquitted, Los Angeles erupted in the largest single civil disturbance in American history The fact that the police withdrew from the neighborhood once the violence began only underscores the Los Angeles Police Department’s failure “to protect and to serve” areas populated by people of color. At the century’s end, new revelations of widespread lying on the stand by police officers led to wholesale investigation into hundreds of convictions obtained by false testimony.

The environmental impact of unaccountable power in the hands of proponents of growth increasingly weighed on the minds and bodies of Californians. While edge cities were supposed to counter the worst elements of urban pollution (“no dark, satanic mills spewing clouds of ash here”), automobiles filled the air with carbon monoxide and other toxins, semiconductor manufacturers filled the land with toxic waste, and drought, firestorms and mudslides in dizzying cyclical succession rearranged the landscape just as humans had before. Add to that the major earthquakes, which regularly shook parts of the state throughout the last decades of the twentieth century and Californians were truly living in an “ecology of fear.”