While the economy fluctuated dramatically from the 1960s to the early 2000s, the state’s profile in architecture and fine arts, sports, and entertainment trended upward. California became increasingly prominent in each of these areas.
Regarding public architecture and the fine arts, California boasted a number of modernist structures receiving international acclaim. In 1997 the Getty Center art museum opened, atop a hill near UCLA. Internationally known architect Richard Meier designed sweeping walls of Roman travertine stone. Inside, visitors enjoyed spectacular exhibitions, featuring paintings, photography, clothing, and more. Los Angeles’ Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, completed in 2002, was designed by world-renowned architect Jose Rafael Moneo and constitutes a study in sun lighting that serves as a visual metaphor of the believer’s pilgrimage toward salvation. The futuristic Walt Disney Concert Hall is situated near the cathedral. Designed by famed architect Frank Gehry and opening in 2003, it is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and its acoustics match the grandeur of the steel-curved exterior, making it one of the world’s finest concert halls. San Francisco featured mostly older though equally respected performance venues, such as its downtown Performing Arts Center. The new home of the M. H. de Young Museum was an exception to this. Designed by the San Francisco firm of Fong & Chan Architects, its modernist copper exterior and sylvan setting in Golden Gate Park render it a singular arts site. Beginning in 1986 structural components of the privately built Orange County Performing Arts Center made their appearance, the family of Renee and Henry Segerstrom having donated the land and much of the seed money to start construction of the huge arts complex.
San Francisco and Los Angeles vied with each other and with Seattle for recognition as the fine-arts capital of the Pacific Rim. Asian and Mexican-themed artwork became pervasive. Mesami Teraoka’s 1990 watercolor Geisha and AIDS Nightmare and Isamu Noguchi’s outdoor sculptures captured the infusion of Japanese aesthetic sensibilities into California art. Similarly, Charles “Chaz” Bojorquez, a former graffiti artist, portrayed street life in the barrios of East Los Angeles in his serigraph (color-print silk screen) Los Avenues.
Sports-wise, the state continued its ascendancy regionally, nationally, and internationally. In professional football the San Francisco 49ers won five Super Bowl Championships between 1981 and 1994. The Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders won three such crowns, in 1977, 1981, and 1984. California’s professional baseball teams - the San Francisco Giants, Oakland Athletics, Anaheim Angels, and San Diego Padres - won a combined total of seven World Series championships between 1972 and 2002. In professional basketball the Los Angeles Lakers won nine National Basketball Association championships. The San Diego/Los Angeles Clippers struggled in the shadow of the Lakers during those years. In ice hockey, the San Jose Sharks (named after the Pacific Ocean predator fish) began their first season of competition in 1991. To the south, the Los Angeles Kings played their first season in 1967-8 and made it to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1993. The Anaheim Ducks, in Orange County, played their first season in 1993 and won the Stanley Cup in 2007. The Los Angeles Galaxy professional soccer team won the Western Conference five times between 1996 and 2002, setting an enviable standard for the state’s other soccer franchises. In professional
Figure 13.7 Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Photo: Palette7 / Shutterstock. com.
Surfing, Kelly Slater - a resident of Florida, California, and Hawai’i - has won 10 world titles since 1992; Rochelle Ballard of Montebello, California, was ranked fourth among women surfers in the world in 1988 and 1990. Southern California sisters Serena and Venus Williams have ranked among the top female tennis players in the world since the late 1990s, and Eldrick Tont (“Tiger”) Woods similarly dominated professional golf into the early 2000s. Since 2006, Amgen, the pharmaceutical giant, has been sponsoring the Amgen Tour of California, which the Los Angeles Times has called “North America’s most prominent cycling race.” The scenic, nearly 800-mile Tour of California has drawn top professional bicycle racers worldwide and has been watched by television viewers in several hundred countries and territories.
In college sports UCLA and USC did well in basketball and football, respectively, while UC Berkeley and Stanford excelled in other sports such as men’s and women’s rowing and cross-country, respectively. In the years 1977-1998, USC won seven national baseball championships. Los Angeles’ stature as an international amateur sports center was enhanced by its hosting of the 1984 Summer Olympics. President Reagan opened the games.
Many of these sporting events and much else were covered by the media headquartered in America’s entertainment capital: Los Angeles. The movie and recording industry seemed recession-proof, with the blockbuster 1997 film Titanic grossing $1.8 billion by 2003. Much of the Oscar-winning best movie was filmed along the Pacific Coast of Baja California and in Long Beach. Hollywood’s fondness for filming below the border, where production costs are minimal, is evidenced in Twentieth Century Fox’s establishment in 1996 of Baja Studios, located just south of Rosarito Beach. Pearl Harbor (2001) and Master and Commander (2003) were both shot at that 35-acre facility and along its adjoining Pacific coastline. Households were beginning to purchase integrated media systems combining radio, television, Internet, motion picture, music, and other services. Still, for those who wished, Universal Studios, Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Sea World, malls, parks, stadiums, campgrounds, and the storied California beaches awaited them. Thus, the “Gold Coast” was not just about conservative politics at the state and national levels; it was also about
Play.
SUMMARY
For three decades beginning in the 1960s California’s affluent “Gold Coast” Republicans spearheaded a national conservative comeback launched from their corporate boardrooms and residences situated along the pricey shoreline from Santa Barbara southward to San Diego. Newport Beach, in Orange County, was and remains the nerve center of conservative politics in the Western United States, if not the entire nation. The Lincoln Club, headquartered there, helped catapult Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the national political arena. Denouncing UC Berkeley protesters, Reagan mobilized voter support for a politics of limits, that is, the conservative agenda of downsizing state government and cutting its social services budget. Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr., a Democrat, was the antithesis of Reagan. Brown supported migrant farm workers’ rights, brought more women into government, doubled funding for public education, and approved environmental safeguards, while restraining state spending and championing his own variant of a politics of limits. Though opposed to Proposition 13 before its 1978 passage, he adapted to the measure that was to have major impacts on state budgets for decades afterward.
A high urban crime rate gave credence to the conservatives’ call for “law and order.” Mounting gang violence and inner-city racial tensions, connected to an increased flow of Pacific Rim immigration, formed a backdrop to the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the O. J. Simpson murder trials held several years later.
Increasingly, California was America’s Pacific Eldorado in terms of economic growth, which despite serious recessions emerged as the world’s sixth-largest economy in the early 2000s. The Golden State’s prosperity was due largely to its diverse sectors, especially Pacific maritime-related enterprises and high technology. By 1980 America’s trade with Asia eclipsed that with Europe, and California was a major player in the $3 trillion Pacific Rim economy. Silicon Valley became the world’s leader in the development and marketing of computers and software products. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang helped keep California on the cutting edge of the information-processing industry.
Economic growth resulted in environmental problems. Struggling against corporate-backed conservative lawmakers, liberal-leaning environmentalists secured some measure
Of environmental protection. The computer industry and agribusiness produced chemical waste that endangered public health. Urbanization and tourism polluted San Francisco Bay and Lake Tahoe respectively. A gigantic oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 sparked an environmental movement leading to the passage of the landmark California Environmental Quality Act in 1970 and the establishment of the statewide Coastal Commission shortly afterward. Pacific Gas and Electric’s contamination of public drinking water led to a huge courtroom verdict in favor of cancer victims in the desert community of Hinckley and the making of the Hollywood film Erin Brockovich. Governor Pete Wilson’s removal of the cap on consumers’ energy rates resulted in Texas-based Enron and other providers gaming California’s energy market in ways that eventuated in criminal prosecution of that corporation’s top executives.
The period from the late 1960s to the early 2000s was not just about “Gold Coast” conservatism and a politics of limits. Leisure-time pursuits and play mattered as well. Cultural and entertainment venues from the Bay Area southward into Baja provided Californians with art treasures, dance, theater, opera, professional and collegiate sports, movies and television, theme parks, and stretches of beaches known worldwide.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
• How would you define “Gold Coast” conservatism? What specific examples can you give of how “Gold Coast” conservatism shaped a politics of limits?
• What impacts did Pacific Rim immigration have on California during the last three decades of the twentieth century?
• What profound shift had taken place in America’s foreign trade by 1980? What was significant about this shift for California’s economy?
• What major environmental problems confronted California from the 1960s through the early 2000s? What steps did environmentalists and the state government take to address these problems?
• What examples can you give of California having become a national/international venue for the arts, entertainment media, and sports from the 1960s through the early 2000s?
FURTHER READINGS
Mark Baldassare, A California State of Mind: The Conflicted Voter in a Changing World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). A public opinion analyst explains how the unstable economy in the 1990s shaped Californians’ concerns, policy views, and distrust of government.
Jerry Brown, Dialogues (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 1998). Brown interviews some of America’s leading religious thinkers, scientists, and artists in a book that demonstrates the author’s analytical brilliance and quest to integrate ideas with actions in the public sphere.
Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2003). The author provides a temperate yet sympathetic view of Ronald Reagan’s governorship.
Shenglin Chang, The Global Silicon Valley Home: Lives and Landscapes within the Taiwanese American Trans-Pacific Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). The author examines how some Taiwanese Americans with homes in California and across the Pacific in Taiwan have adapted their identities and landscapes accordingly.
Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). The author situates California in the vanguard of America’s nearly continuous Pacific shift, detailing trade matters in the late twentieth century.
Serge Dedina, Wild Sea: Eco-Wars and Surf Stories from the Coast of the Californias (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). The author narrates the shared ecological concerns and joint activist efforts linking surfers and environmentalists in Baja and southern California.
Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society (New York: HarperCol-lins, 1993). A foremost management authority contends that in the computer age capital, land, and labor are no longer the major resources; instead, knowledge workers will shape the economies of competing nations.
James Flanigan, Smile Southern California, You’re the Center of the Universe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). This is a very readable treatise on southern California’s outsized role in the Pacific Rim economy in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Alex L. Fradkin and Philip L. Fradkin, The Left Coast: California on the Edge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). The product of a father-son team, this visually sumptuous work pays tribute to the history, character, ecology, and beauty of the California coast.
Tom Hayden, Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence (New York: The New Press, 2004). The author attributes much of the responsibility for the formation of California-connected Pacific Rim gangs to America’s neglect of urban poverty at home and the arming of warring factions in Central America.
Erik J. Heikkila and Rafael Pizarro, eds., Southern California and the World (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). This is a highly theoretical anthology that analyzes California’s roles as a center of international communication and economic flows, a microcosm of the world’s cultural diversity, and an exporter of its own values and aspirations to other countries.
Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster, eds., Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County since World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). This anthology traces Orange County’s shift from a collection of cities and suburbs to a new kind of social formation replete with distinct and separable centers that include residential neighborhoods, malls, and industrial parks.
Joel Kotkin and Paul Grabowicz, California, Inc. (New York: Rawson, Wade, 1982). The authors treat California’s prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s as an outgrowth of its growing trade with Pacific Rim countries.
Abraham F. Lowenthal, Global California: Rising to the Cosmopolitan Challenge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Californians must develop a global mindset, contends this work, in order to address pressing international challenges that include climate change, environmental pollution, and trade competition.
Gerald C. Lubenow, ed., Governing California: Politics, Government, and Public Policy in the Golden State (Berkeley: Regents of the University of California, 2006). This brief anthology provides an overview of how California government operates, offering insightful thumbnail sketches of governors from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). The building of a powerful, respectable grassroots conservative movement in 1960s Orange County is detailed in this book on how the Republican Party recovered from Barry Goldwater’s defeat in his bid for the presidency.
Glenna Matthews, Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). This penetrating study views the transition of Silicon Valley from a farming area to a high-technology Mecca from the perspectives of the women whose lives were bound up with that transformation.
Thomas J. Osborne, “Pacific Eldorado: Rethinking Greater California’s Past,” California History, 87/1 (2009), 2645. Reframing California history within a Pacific Basin context, this article anticipates the present textbook.
Robert Pack, Jerry Brown: The Philosopher-Prince (New York: Stein and Day, 1978). Brown is treated as a young political outlier, whose unconventional thinking and governance have been as unique as the state he has led.
Peter Schrag, Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future (New York: The Free Press, 1998). A liberal-minded columnist chronicles California’s descent in terms of governance following passage of Proposition 13.
Peter Schrag, California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Disinvestment in California’s infrastructure, attributed to Proposition 13 and similar initiative-driven measures, is treated as a warning to both the state and nation in the twenty-first century.
Michael A. Shires, Patterns in California Government Revenues since Proposition 13 (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 1999). This empirical study shows that all units of local government in the state have experienced a significant drop in their “self-controlled revenue” between 1978 and 1995 due to Proposition 13.
Michael A. Shires et al., Has Proposition 13 Delivered? The Changing Tax Burden in California (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 1998). The authors conclude that, controlling for inflation, by 1998 per capita state revenues declined by 16 percent since 1978, when Proposition 13 went into effect.
Kevin Starr, Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 19902003 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Packed with illustrative detail, this book narrates the effects of California’s roUer-coaster economy on society and culture.
World History
