If the comparative word “greater” applied to the state in earlier times, it made even more sense during the Pat Brown era, when so many things about California were greater than
Before and greater compared to other states: population size, the extent of the state’s water infrastructure and freeway systems, the scale and quality of public higher education, the scope of the student and farm labor protest movements, and more. In terms of population growth, as noted, California became the largest state in the Union in 1962, surpassing New York. Americans poured into what seemed a Pacific Eldorado, replete with jobs and the promise of a good life, at the rate of 1,000 a day in the first half of the 1960s, edging the population up near the 20 million mark. Los Angeles County became the nation’s most populous, while Orange and San Diego counties grew apace. To continue its growth, the super state was in need of enhancements: the Southland needed water; suburbanites needed transit to their workplaces; and the burgeoning economy needed an educated workforce.
Enhancing the mega-state would be costly. Unapologetically, Brown raised income, inheritance, and corporate taxes as well as those on tobacco products. Imposts for the poor were lowered. Altogether, the increases netted the state an additional $256 million a year. “I have nothing but contempt for those who say that no new taxes are necessary,” Brown confided in his diary.
En route to making California even greater, one of the governor’s proudest achievements was the State Water Project. The project envisioned the building of the Oroville Dam, the tallest in the United States, on the Feather River to provide flood control and water to San Joaquin Valley corporate landholders. From the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta the so-called California Aqueduct would be built to meet the future water needs of an expanding Southland population. A Peripheral Canal, skirting the delta in order to feed only nonsaline water into the aqueduct, was included in the plan.
Even with the unprecedented strength of Democrats in Sacramento, Brown had to fight for the project. Opposition arose from San Francisco, nearly always resistant to measures supplying northern California water to the parched Southland. The California Labor Federation decried the cheap water that would go to corporate land owners, since the federal stipulation that only farms of 160 acres or less could receive water flows was not contained in the measure. Even the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California opposed the project initially, fearing the district’s claim to Colorado River water might be weakened in an ongoing Supreme Court trial brought by Arizona.
Brown met and beat the opposition. The 1959 passage of the Water Resources Development Bond (Burns-Porter) Act authorized putting before California voters a $1.75 billion bond issue incorporated in Proposition 1. Throughout America’s states and cities, expensive public works projects, such as that encompassed in the Burns-Porter Act, have often been financed by the sale of bonds to investors who are contractually entitled to a rate of interest on the money loaned to a given state or municipal government. State or city taxpayers will eventually pay off such bonds; in the meantime a given project will go forward and usually be completed long before the bond is retired. Historian Kevin Starr rightly holds that the Burns-Porter bill called for “the most ambitious water storage and distribution system in the history of the human race.” Brown deployed the full range of his lobbying skills to secure passage of the measure in June, after which he signed the landmark legislation. In November 1960 California voters went to the polls and by a thin margin of 174,000 votes out of 5.8 million cast approved the water bonds, which financed the early stage of the State Water Project. Except for the Peripheral Canal, the
Major components of the project have been completed, including the Oroville Dam, 32 reservoirs, 17 pumping stations, and 662 miles of canals and pipelines.
In addition to more water, the super state needed more highways and modern metropolitan rail transit. With a population of 15 million people in 1959, California led the nation in the number of cars, with 7 million registered automobiles and as many drivers. In the southern reaches of the state where the car was king the Sacramento government built America’s first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, in 1940. Freeways were so called because, unlike expressways on the East Coast, they were toll-free. In 1959 Brown signed the Freeway and Expressway Act calling for $10.5 billion of construction during the next 20 years. State spending, at ever higher levels, kept the highway-building trend going well into Brown’s governorship. When he took office the state’s gas tax stood at 6 cents per gallon; in 1963 it went up another cent, by which time California was spending more than $633.5 million a year on highways. These funds were supplemented by federal dollars resulting from Congress’s passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which aimed to link the nation by building 41,000 miles of freeways/expressways by 1972. In the 1960s and 1970s, these federal funds built the San Diego, Golden State, Santa Monica, San Bernardino, Foothill, and San Gabriel River freeways.
The geographically compact Bay Area was not nearly as supportive of freeway construction as was the sprawling Southland. San Franciscans defeated plans to build seven freeways linking the Embarcadero waterfront to the Golden Gate Bridge, then passing through scenic and historic Golden Gate Park and crisscrossing the city. Instead, San Franciscans opted for electric-powered, fast, light rail transit. Thus in 1962, by which time Los Angeles had dismantled its excellent Pacific Electric “Red Car” rail network, voters in San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties passed a measure establishing the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART). Since 1972 the BART system has been providing commuters with a low-cost, convenient, automated, computerized rail service.
Public higher education was a third major policy area of concern for Brown as he set about building an even greater California. His challenge was twofold: to supply highly educated professionals needed to sustain economic growth; and to find a solution to the ongoing disputes between the state colleges and universities regarding the awarding of doctorates and the funding of discipline-oriented research. By the late 1950s the number of state colleges had grown to 15 and their enrollments had, overall, tripled in that decade. The leaders of these institutions, founded to graduate teachers, wanted to award doctorates and receive research funding, just like the UCs. To end the competition between the two systems of higher education, maintain and enhance the quality of the UCs, and ensure public access to post-secondary education, Brown supported what came to be called A Master Plan for Higher Education in California, 1960-1975. The plan was put into operation when the Donohoe Act, named after Assemblywoman Dorothy M. Donohoe who chaired the committee that wrote it, was passed by the state legislature and signed by Governor Brown on April 26, 1960.
The historic master plan established a three-tiered, tuition-free, system of public higher education. Students graduating in the top one-eighth (12.5 percent) of their high-school class would be eligible for UC admission. The UCs could award bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. Those graduating in the top one-third (33.3 percent) would be directed
To the state colleges, renamed “universities” or CSUs in 1971. These institutions could award bachelor’s and master’s degrees. All other students, high-school graduates or not, could attend two-year junior (later called community) colleges, where they could earn associate of arts degrees before transferring to the UCs or state colleges, or pursue career/vocational training.
California’s master plan quickly drew national and worldwide praise. Time magazine ran a feature story on it and posted University of California President Clark Kerr, who had spearheaded negotiations on that plan, on its cover. While a profound thinker and respected labor economist, President Kerr was also known for his wit, as when he earlier served as UC Berkeley’s chancellor he quipped that many saw his primary responsibilities as “providing parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni.” The blueprint for public higher education, however, is what put him on the Time cover and would shape his legacy. Meeting in Paris, the European Organization for Economic Cooperation Development declared that the master plan “represents the most advanced effort to construct a system of mass higher education. . . while maintaining a quality of research and education. . . unsurpassed anywhere. . . in the world.” By the late 1960s, 23 other states had put into operation similar master plans.
Meanwhile, UC Berkeley’s academic reputation continued to soar, as did that of UCLA, which had joined the top tier of national universities. By the 1950s Berkeley had the largest number of Nobel Laureates on its faculty of any American university. Speaking at Berkeley in 1962, President John F. Kennedy, a Harvard graduate, stated: “When I observe the men who surround me in Washington, I am forced to confront an uncomfortable truth - the New Frontier may well owe more to Berkeley than to Harvard.” In 1964 the American Council on Education rated Berkeley the “best balanced distinguished university,” public or private, in the United States. Writing in the early 1970s, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that nearly one-third of the professors of economics at his venerable university had been recruited “from the University of California at Berkeley.”
Governor Brown remained a strong advocate of California’s master plan for higher education. During his governorship, state spending on the UCs more than doubled, and more than tripled for the state colleges. Three new university campuses and four new state colleges were established, while funding was increased for community colleges and the K-12 system. By almost any measure, during the Pat Brown era Greater California had spawned America’s, and arguably the world’s, greatest system of public higher education.
World History
