Where I Was From Read online

  Hanson lives on the family farm, but no longer actually farms it. “When we all went to the universities, when we abandoned what made us good and embraced what made us comfortable and secure, we lost something essential, knew we lost it and yet chose to lose,” he writes. “Material bounty and freedom are so much stronger incentives than sacrifice and character.” What was lost by the “we” of this passage, and in Hansons view by America itself, was the pure hardship of the agrarian life, the yeoman ideal that constituted the country’s “last link with the founding fathers of our political and spiritual past,” its last line of defense against “market capitalism and entitlement democracy, the final stage of Western culture that is beyond good and evil.”

  This gets tricky. Notice the way in which the author implicitly frames his indictment of himself and his family for turning away from the pure agrarian life as an indictment of the rest of us, for failing to support that life. Notice, too, that the “destruction” of the San Joaquin Valley, as he sees it, began at the point when the small family farms on the east side of the Valley (the arid west side of the Valley, the part described by William Henry Brewer in the 1860s as a “plain of absolute desolation,” belonged to the corporate growers) began giving way first to industrial parks and subdivisions and then to strip malls and meth labs. “Its Golden Age was therefore brief, no more than the beautiful century between 1870 and 1970, when gravity-fed irrigation in hand-dug ditches from the Sierra first turned a weed-infested desert into an oasis of small tree and vine farms and their quiet satellite communities.”

  This “Golden Age,” in other words, began with the arrival of Hansons own family, and ended with his own adolescence. “Times have changed,” as the similarly focused Saxon Brown complained to Billy Roberts in The Valley of the Moon. “They’ve changed even since I was a little girl.” There is a further possible mirage here: the San Joaquin Valley’s “beautiful century” could have seemed, to those who were actually living it, perhaps not entirely golden: “Here, in this corner of a great nation, here, on the edge of the continent, here, in this valley of the West, far from the great centers, isolated, remote, lost, the great iron hand crushes life from us, crushes liberty and the pursuit of happiness from us…. Tell them, five years from now, the story of the fight between the League of the San Joaquin and the railroad and it will not be believed.” That was Frank Norris, writing in The Octopus, on the slaughter that took place in 1880 at Mussel Slough, now Lucerne, now and then just fifteen miles from Selma, the site of the farmhouse in which six generations of Victor Davis Hanson’s family have lived.

  “There in my own small town,” Hanson tells us in The Land Was Everything, “we have torn up vineyards and now have planted the following crops: Wal-Mart, Burger King, Food-4-Less, Baskin-Robbins, Cinema 6, Denny’s, Wendy’s, Payless, Andersen’s Pea Soup, the Holiday Inn, McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr., Taco Bell, four gas stations, three shopping centers, two videotape stores, and a car wash.” In line with the thrust of his argument, Hanson offers this list as evidence of “change,” specifically of the moral or spiritual impoverishment to which he believes the loss of the yeoman ethic in the San Joaquin Valley has led. Some readers—those, say, who remain unconvinced that there was ever a yeoman ethic in the San Joaquin Valley to lose—might take from the list evidence of a less elusive impoverishment: the enterprises named are in the main national chains, or franchises, not the kinds of entrepreneurial activity calculated to return either money or opportunity to the community.

  According to a study conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, the poverty rate in the San Joaquin Valley in the year 2000 was in fact twenty-two percent of the population, the highest in the state, which in turn had an overall poverty rate, when adjusted for cost of living, exceeded in the United States only by that of the District of Columbia. This overall California poverty rate began exceeding that of the rest of the nation only in the late 1980s, but being poor in the Central Valley was not a new condition. In 1980, of the ten American metropolitan areas most reliant on public assistance, six were in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, running south from Redding and Yuba City-Marysville and Stockton straight down through Modesto and Fresno and Visalia. Many assumed California’s rising poverty rate to be a function of immigration, and to some degree, in the short term, it was: the foreign-born, particularly those from Southeast Asia and Hispanic America, who did have the highest rate of poverty in the state.

  In the Central Valley, however, immigration did not tell the whole story. In 1998, Tulare County began paying its welfare clients the cost of relocating in other states, providing an average of $2,300 a client to rent a U-Haul van and buy gas and stay in motels en route and pay first-and-last-month rent on a place to live once they get there. This policy, which also includes e-mailing job applications and mining the Internet for apartment rentals, has since been adopted by four other San Joaquin counties, Kings, Madera, Fresno, and Kern. In June 2001 and June 2002, reporters from first The New York Times and then The Washington Post interviewed samplings of these relocated clients. There were David Langley and his wife and child, who moved from Visalia to Colorado, as did Jackie and Michael Foster, “with their year-old red-haired son.” There was Lorrie Gedert, who moved with her two daughters from Ivanhoe, about ten miles outside Visalia, to Little Rock. There were Gloria and Nathan Dickerson, who moved with their two children, Emily and Drake, from Visalia to Ocala, Florida. There were Richard and Zena White, who moved from Fresno to Slidell, Louisiana, where, according to the Post, both are now working full-time, “Zena as an assistant manager at a Chevron gas station and Richard as a shift manager at McDonald’s.” What first strikes the reader of these reports is that the names of the former Californians interviewed do not uniformly suggest recent immigration from Southeast Asia or Hispanic America. What next strikes the reader is that even such marginal jobs as assistant manager at the Chevron station and shift manager at the McDonald’s appear to have been unobtainable in the San Joaquin Valley, here where the vineyards got torn up so the Wal-Marts and the Burger Kings and the Taco Bells could grow, here, as Frank Norris saw it in 1901, in this corner of a great nation, here, on the edge of the continent, here, in this valley of the West, far from the great centers, isolated, remote, lost.

  3

  FOR most of my life California felt rich to me: that was the point of it, that was the promise, the reward for having left the past on the Sweetwater, the very texture of the place. This was by no means to say that I believed all or even most Californians to be rich, only to suggest that the fact of having no money seemed to me to lack, in California, the immutable gravity that characterized the condition elsewhere. It was not designed to be a life sentence. You were meant, if you were a Californian, to know how to lash together a corral with bark, you were meant to know how to tent a raft and live on the river, you were meant to show spirit, kill the rattlesnake, keep moving. There were in California a lot of “dead brokes,” Henry George had pointed out in 1868, in a passage from “What the Railroad Will Bring Us” that got read to me (rather selectively, in retrospect) by my grandfather, “but there never was a better country to be ‘broken’ in, and where almost every man, even the most successful, had been in the same position, it did not involve the humiliation and loss of hope which attaches to utter poverty in older and more settled communities.”

  That I should have continued, deep into adult life, to think of California as I was told as a child that it had been in 1868 suggests a confusion of some magnitude, but there it was. It’s not a word we use, my mother had said about class. It’s not the way we think. Only in the 1980s did certain facts—two of them, not unrelated—manage to penetrate what was clearly a fairly tenacious wish not to examine whatever it was I needed to believe. The first fact, which entered my attention as an almost personal affront, was that California no longer felt rich enough to adequately fund its education system. The second, or corollary, fact was that there seemed to be many towns in California—
including towns I knew, towns I thought of as my own interior landscape, towns I had thought I understood, towns in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys—so impoverished in spirit as well as in fact that the only way their citizens could think to reverse their fortunes was by getting themselves a state prison. Since the building and staffing of new prisons were major reasons why California no longer felt rich enough to adequately fund its education system, this second fact initially presented itself as an even deeper affront than the first, evidence that a “new” California had finally and fatally sold out the old.

  Then I remembered, then I realized.

  We were seeing nothing “new” here.

  We were seeing one more version of making our deal with the Southern Pacific.

  We were seeing one more version of making our bed with the federal government.

  We were seeing one more enthusiastic fall into a familiar California error, that of selling the future of the place we lived to the highest bidder, which was in this instance the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.

  The California Correctional Peace Officers Association is the prison guards’ union, a 29,000-member force that has maintained for some years now the most effective lobbying operation in Sacramento. In the 1998 election cycle, for example, the union funneled over two million dollars to Grey Davis’s gubernatorial campaign and another three million dollars to various other candidates and propositions. “All I’ve ever asked is that we get to play in the ballpark with all the big guys and gals out there,” Don Novey told The Los Angeles Times in 2000. Don Novey is the former guard at Folsom State Prison who became in 1980 the president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. “They call us the 800-pound gorilla. But we’re just taking care of our own like everybody else.” Don Novey refers to those who consider the need for new prisons an arguable proposition as “the other element.” He gave $75,000 to the opponent of a state senator who had once spoken against a prison bond issue. “If Don Novey ran the contractors’ union,” a Republican strategist told the Times, “there’d be a bridge over every puddle in the state.” The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the victims’ rights movement. The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the 1994 “three strikes” legislation and initiative, the act that mandated a sentence of twenty-five years to life for any third felony conviction, even for crimes as minor as growing a marijuana plant on a windowsill or shoplifting a bottle of Ripple. The prison guards were the political muscle that had by the year 2000 made the California corrections system, with thirty-three penitentiaries and 162,000 inmates, the largest in the western hemisphere.

  Incarceration was not always a growth industry in California. In 1852 there was only San Quentin, by 1880 there was also Folsom. During the 104 years that followed, a century during which the population of California increased from 865,000 to 25,795,000 people, the state found need for only ten additional facilities, most of them low or medium security. It was only in 1984, four years after Don Novey took over the union, that the new max and supermax prisons began rolling online, Solano in 1984, “New Folsom” (a quarter mile removed from “Old Folsom”) in 1986, Avenal and lone and Stockton and San Diego in 1987, Corcoran and Blythe in 1988, Pelican Bay in 1989, Chowchilla in 1990, Wasco in 1991, Calipa-tria in 1992, Lancaster and Imperial and Centinela and Delano in 1993, Coalinga and a second prison at Blythe in 1994, second prisons at both Susanville and Chowchilla in 1995, Soledad in 1996, a second prison at Corcoran in 1997.

  Delano, the town in the San Joaquin between Tulare and Bakersfield that became synonymous outside California with Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers’ union, still yearns for its own second prison, “New Delano,” to be built just across the road from what is already called “Old Delano,” the ten-year-old North Kern State Prison. Men-dota, west of Fresno and south of Chowchilla, still waits for what was to have been its privately built and operated prison, on which construction was begun and then postponed by the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, which had hit a snag trying to contract with the state for prisoners to fill the $100 million maximum-security prison it had already built in the Mojave desert. “They can build whatever prisons they want,” Don Novey had said to this point. “But the hell if they’re going to run them.”

  That these prisons should remain the objects of abject civic desire is curious, since they have not actually enriched the towns that got them. A new prison creates jobs, but few of those jobs go to local hires. The Department of Corrections allows that it imports half the “corrections workers” in any new prison, but “tries” to hire the rest from the community. Opponents to “New Delano” point out that only seven to nine percent of the jobs at these new prisons have typically been local hires, and that the local hires get the low-paid service jobs. Of the 1,600 projected jobs at “New Delano,” only 72 would be local hires. There are, moreover, costs, both economic and social: when the families of inmates move into a prison town, they not only strain the limited resources of local schools and social service agencies but bring emotionally stressed children into the community and school system. “The students are all very high risk,” a school official in Lassen County, where Susanville is located, told The Los Angeles Times. “They come from single-parent homes. They’re latchkey kids, often on AFDC. It’s very obvious they’re from a whole different area. It creates societal conflicts. The child does not fit in.”

  It was 1993 when the California Department of Corrections activated its first “death fence,” at Calipatria. It was 1994 when the second “death fence” was activated, at Lancaster, carrying a charge of 650 milliamperes, almost ten times the voltage required to cause instant death. “What the fence does is take out the human-error part,” the warden at Lancaster was quoted as having said, explaining that the million-dollar fences would save money in the long run because armed officers could be removed from prison gun towers. “The fence never goes to sleep. It doesn’t go to the bathroom. It doesn’t do any of those things. It’s always working.” It was also 1994 when standardized testing of reading skills among California fourth-graders placed them last in the nation, below Mississippi, tied only with Louisiana. It was 1995 when, for the first time, California spent more on its prisons than on its two university systems, the ten campuses of the University of California and the twenty-four campuses of California State University.

  Through most of my life I would have interpreted the growth of the prison system and the diminution of the commitment to public education as evidence of how California had “changed.” Only recently did I come to see them as the opposite, evidence of how California had “not changed,” and to understand “change” itself as one of the cultures most enduring misunderstandings about itself.

  4

  “The American community in early California fairly represented, as we shall see, the average national culture and character. But no other part of our land was ever so rapidly peopled as was California in the first golden days. Nowhere else were we Americans more affected than here, in our lives and conduct, by the feeling that we stood in the position of conquerors in a new land. Nowhere else, again, were we ever before so long forced by circumstance to live at the mercy of a very wayward chance, and to give to even our most legitimate business a dangerously speculative character. Nowhere else were we driven so hastily to improvise a government for a large body of strangers; and nowhere else did fortune so nearly deprive us for a little time of our natural devotion to the duties of citizenship. We Americans therefore showed, in early California, new failings and new strength. We exhibited a novel degree of carelessness and overhastiness, an extravagant trust in luck, a previously unknown blindness to our social duties, and an indifference to the rights of foreigners, whereof we cannot be proud. But we also showed our best national traits—traits that went far to atone for our faults. As a body, our pioneer community in California was persistently cheerful, energetic, courageous, and teachable. In a few years it ha
d repented of its graver faults, it had endured with charming good humor their severest penalties, and it was ready to begin with fresh devotion the work whose true importance it had now at length learned—the work of building a well-organized, permanent, and progressive State on the Pacific Coast. In this work it has been engaged ever since.”

  —Josiah Royce,

  California: A Study of American Character, 1886

  JUST east of Sacramento, off Kilgore Road in what is now Rancho Cordova, a town with a population of almost fifty thousand that exists only because Aerojet General began manufacturing rockets there after World War Two, there is a three-acre family graveyard, the Matthew Kilgore Cemetery, its gates long gone, its two-hundred-some graves overgrown and many of its stone markers, a few of which are dated as recently as the 1970s, overturned. Two of my great-great-great-grandparents, Matthew Kilgore and his wife Massa McGuire Kilgore, were buried there, Massa Kilgore in 1876, Matthew Kilgore in 1882. When I was in high school and college and later I would sometimes drive out there, park the car and sit on the fender and read, but after the day I noticed, as I was turning off the ignition, a rattlesnake slide from a broken stone into the dry grass, I never again got out of the car.