California, the media like to tell us, faces an unprecedented fiscal crisis. The budget deficit is $40 billion and growing. The state is so short of cash that, within days, it may issue IOUs, rather than checks, to pay its bills. The Legislature, bitterly divided, seems unable to agree on a way out. The governor warns of "financial Armageddon."
How should we prepare for apocalypse?
Before you hide under your bed, check out a few books by some of California's leading journalistic interpreters of the last 160 years.
You probably won't have to read very long before you're reminded that big deficits and threats of fiscal crisis aren't exactly new here. In fact, the notion of California as a place where current resources don't meet present needs is at least as old as the Donner Party. And the state's leaders have always been -- in the eyes of journalists -- fools and knaves, unable to resolve persistent financial problems.
"The scoundrels are in power, and they have wrecked the country," Hinton Helper wrote, after having spent three years reporting on the state, in his 1855 book "The Land of Gold," an early anti-California screed. "Today the State is lawless, penniless and powerless."
In California, it seems, Armageddon is always right around the corner.
As to why this is, nothing offers a better explanation than Carey McWilliams' 1949 classic, "California: The Great Exception." Sixty years after publication, it reads as though McWilliams, who died in 1980, turned in the manuscript last week.
"The state is always off balance, stretching itself precariously," McWilliams wrote. California, governmentally speaking, is "a giant adolescent" with a "notorious lack of social and political equilibrium."
As evidence, McWilliams listed the financial troubles -- he used the word "crisis" -- that faced California in his time. The schools lacked good teachers, proper resources and materials (particularly in the gigantic Los Angeles district). Health facilities couldn't keep up with rising medical costs. The state's roads and waterworks were outdated and decaying. The prison system was criminally overcrowded. All these deficits persisted, McWilliams lamented, despite big increases in state spending during a postwar boom.
"Even at the limping pace at which facilities have been expanded, and they have never kept abreast of current needs, governmental costs have skyrocketed," he wrote.
The list of major problems facing the state today, of course, is nearly identical.
This would not have surprised McWilliams. A lawyer and journalist who moved to New York in the 1950s to become editor of the Nation, he knew California and its government outside and in. Culbert Olson, the state's only Democratic governor in the first half of the 20th century, appointed McWilliams head of California's division of immigrants and housing in 1939. He advocated so aggressively for the rights of migrant workers that growers labeled him the state's No. 1 "agricultural pest."
Experience taught McWilliams that for all the apocalyptic rhetoric in the "short memoried press" ("There has always been something about [California] that has incited hyperbole," he wrote), the state's persistent fiscal shortfalls were part of its character -- a direct consequence of the size, diversity and dynamism that made California great.
McWilliams blamed the Gold Rush for shaping California in this way. Too many people had come too quickly for the state to constitute itself in anything approaching a normal manner. By the early 1870s, California was such a financial and political mess that the entire constitution had to be thrown out. California is "a community of irresponsible strangers," wrote Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce in his 1886 book, "California: A Study of American Character." The fortune seekers who moved here in search of gold lived and governed by a philosophy of "something for nothing." Miners took $100 million in treasure out of the ground without paying taxes on it.
"From that time to the present, governmental services have lagged far behind population growth," McWilliams wrote. "Other states have gone through this phase too, but California has never emerged from it."
Put simply, the state simply grows too fast for its government to keep up. No governing system -- and certainly no mere politician -- can manage constant revolution.
And so, a liberal giant, Gov. Pat Brown, taxed and spent. His successor, the conservative hero Ronald Reagan, inherited Brown's deficit and taxed and spent even more. Every generation of California interpreter, before or after McWilliams, has observed this dynamic. In her 2003 book, "Where I Was From," Joan Didion noted, "There had been then from the beginning, these obliterating increases, rates of growth that systematically erased freshly laid traces of custom and community."
