Tag: History

by Georgia Jeffries

From Boom Fall 2012, Vol. 2, No. 3

Whose California?

The ancient rifle of a long-dead Californian arrived without warning. Unsolicited. Uninvited. A surprise bequest from an elder cousin who earned his master’s in history from Claremont College and took pride in his role as the family archivist. The weapon, empty of shells and unexpectedly elegant, is sequestered in our upstairs closet. To protect the oak stock and copper case, it came cradled in soft white bunting, which we have unwrapped only a handful of times. A shrouded ghost, it stands in a dark corner behind winter coats and a faded bridesmaid dress as one year, then another, flows by.

Five years now since it arrived. A sobering time for family and neighbors faced with the ills of our state’s recession. Almost 136 years have passed since the gun killed game or human beings. No longer used for the reason it was created, the gun still serves a purpose. Like all trophies collected after armed struggle, it is a symbol. A symbol of danger contained, loss justified, greater crisis averted. And like all sacred relics saved by the generations that came before, it comes with a story.

This handsome Henry rifle, one of thousands of repeating firearms first manufactured during the Civil War, was taken from Tiburcio Vasquez after his capture by Los Angeles Sheriff William Rowland on 14 May 1874. A public servant eyeing his odds for reelection, Rowland presented the rifle as a “token of friendship” to Judge Stephen C. Hubbell, one of the leading citizens of the anglicized El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles who had urged authorities to put a stop to the robber’s raids on new settlers’ ranches. After two infamous decades robbing banks and rustling horses in the northern part of the state, Vasquez had traveled south. Many feared he would target downtown Los Angeles next.

Judge Hubbell, my husband’s great-grandfather, was an Ohio native who came west to prosper, serve society, and raise a family. All historical accounts indicate he fulfilled his dream. A cofounder of the University of Southern California, he was elected the school’s first treasurer. Also a respected philanthropist, he donated a substantial portion of his land, Westlake Park, to city fathers (who would later rename it MacArthur Park in honor of the World War II general). He was a generous man, once his property was secured and no longer under threat by a notorious, lawless “Mexican,” as Vasquez was called in the press coverage of the time.1

Along with the rifle, we received original front-page clippings from the 29 December 1889 edition of the Los Angeles Times. Dry and amber with age, “The Robber Vasquez” headlined columns had been pasted with care on sturdy cardboard. The article profiled eyewitness “reminiscences” of San Francisco Chronicle correspondent George Beers, who accompanied Rowland’s posse on its historic adventure. Beers interviewed Vasquez, only thirty-nine, shortly before his death in San Jose on 14 March 1875. Convicted of murdering three unarmed men while his band robbed a general store in Tres Pinos, he had been sentenced by a jury of norteamericanos to hang on the gallows. (Accounts differ as to whether Vasquez or members of his gang bear responsibility for the actual killing. He admitted the robbery, but denied committing murder on that occasion or at any other time during his twenty-three-year outlaw career.)2

“I had a good opportunity to study his character,” Beers reported. “A remarkable man … his original boyish idea was that he could incite a revolution among the Spanish-speaking population and recover Southern California from the United States… .”

Truth? Romantic revisionism from the lips of a man about to die? A blending of both? When I look at Vasquez’s rifle, preserved by Anglos he once terrified, I consider Faulkner’s admonition: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”3 And I wonder what the bandido would think of his beloved homeland now.

A net of despair

Outsiders, outcasts, and outlaws have always been the real creators of the California dream. When there is less to lose, it is often easier to make the risky move. Like our ancestors, contemporary residents will need courage to transform a less than happy present into a better tomorrow. They will also need a bold vision, one that trades the historical glory of rugged western individualism for pragmatic commitment to the larger common good.

The despair that has always danced among the have-nots in the hills and valleys of California is expanding its dark net. Since 2005 more people have left California than have arrived from the rest of the country.4 And for good reason. The state of our state is foreboding.

According to the Los Angeles Times, six million Californians, 16.3 percent of residents, already live in poverty, and many more are perilously close.5 Twenty percent of the population has no health insurance, and extreme cuts to Medi-Cal are planned.6 Over 2.2 million are unemployed.7 In 2010 the state’s median household income fell 4.6 percent, the largest decline in a single year since record keeping began. According to a recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, nearly half of California adults now consider themselves among the have-nots.8 These figures are even more alarming because, as the pundits often note, ours is a bellwether state. As California goes, so goes the nation.

This is not what my parents would have predicted when they left Illinois to take an intercontinental gamble on the long road west in the sixties. Everybody was making the trek and making good, according to a dreamy Technicolor cover story in the LOOK magazine prominently displayed on the mahogany coffee table—a table that, as it happened, did not make the cut when our small U-Haul was packed to the ceiling with heirlooms, china, and three toys from my childhood bedroom. (Only three, my mother insisted.) The rest were sold at our suburban front yard auction along with sofas, chairs, an antique rolltop desk, patio furniture, and assorted tools. Like the pioneers who had gone before, my parents thought it wise to lighten the load. Our family was moving to the Golden State to better ourselves.

Better, that was the word. So powerful it serves as both verb and adjective. Better climate, better health, better job for my father, and better educational opportunities for me at the University of California in the years to come. No one leaves ancestral foundations to fall backward. But for many who arrived during the great California migrations of the last half-century, that “better” life has become a nightmare of diminishing returns.

Not everyone is suffering, of course. Multimillionaires formerly of Silicon Valley have reinvented themselves in the hot, new tech Valhalla of San Francisco, and bling-obsessed, reality-programmed “real housewives” are cropping up south of Beverly Hills in the McMansions of Orange County. What has gone missing in the last decades is the California middle class. Granted, there were many gradations in this vast middle—“almost” lower-middle, “about to be” middle-middle, “not quite yet” upper-middle—but there was only one acceptable direction on the ladder of prosperity: up. Hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying folks could rely on collecting their just rewards in a rosy and very near future. Every few years, a new car, a new house and—yes!—a better job with a bigger salary and more benefits. That way of life went down the drain with five-figure entry-level first homes and tuition-free education for in-state residents at the best state college and public university systems in the country. (UC’s annual undergraduate tuition is expected to rise to $22,068 within the next four years.)9

Aristotle argued that true virtue lies in the median between extremes.10 Within that virtue blooms happiness. The great philosopher was no economist, but the principle holds: how can happiness exist without a certain level of balance and stability? Certainly, the California middle class loomed as the ideal for generations of immigrants from Dust Bowl Okies to post-World War II aerospace factory workers to displaced Vietnamese, Armenians, and Afghans seeking political asylum. Getting rich might be nice, but a solid middle-class niche, affordable mortgage, and college-educated children embodied the sweet smell of success. Eden has been lost. Again.

On 17 June 2011, the Pasadena Star-News reported that a group of homeowners, at risk of foreclosure, appealed to Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca for help.11 Representatives of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment called for Baca to place a moratorium on foreclosure evictions. Unfortunately, the sheriff was out of town, and there were no later news reports that he might mount a posse on behalf of the frightened citizenry desperate to protect their property from forces they could not fight alone.

On New Year’s Day in Pasadena a few years ago, before the real estate market tanked and gave our state the dubious distinction of leading the nation in foreclosures,12 I was walking home among a large crowd of Rose Parade revelers after the last marching band headed north on Sierra Madre Boulevard. The air was clear and crisp, the view of the San Gabriels spectacular. A glorious January morning flooded with California sunshine and the fragrance of fresh blossoms. This is what our ancestors had traveled thousands of hard miles to enjoy. That’s when I overheard two women talking behind me. One was complaining to the other: “We finally get California back and then the Chinese come in and take it away from us. Who do they think they are?” As I turned the corner, I noticed the ladies were Latina. And I was pretty sure they were talking about the influx of Asian families moving into San Marino, Monterey Park, and other parts of the San Gabriel Valley.

“Who do they think they are?”

Well, “they”—whoever “they” are—assume they are entitled to carve out as large a wedge of the California pie as they can beg, borrow, buy—or steal—for themselves. Vasquez’s ancestors were immigrants too, loyal soldiers of the Spanish crown who occupied the fertile valleys that belonged to the original indigenous Californians, Tongas and Chumash, here long before European interlopers descended. Victorious conquistadores and pious mission priests made no apologies for taking what they wanted. They determined their needs came before other lesser beings, and after all, there was enough. Surely there would always be enough for the people that mattered.

The villains change. So do the innocent. The story does not. Bandidos or banks. Latinos or Asians. White or Black. Somebody somewhere is trying to take what we have … what we can no longer afford … what we cannot save because the forces we battle are too large and we are too small.

Or are we?

Anger—and the fear that fuels it—can do more than close ranks. It can also activate change and broaden the playing field. Witness the power of unified rage within the Occupy movement. Occupy Oakland. Occupy Los Angeles. Occupy the 2012 Pasadena Rose Parade? Yes, yes, and yes. To paraphrase Paddy Chayefsky’s furious prophet of the airwaves in the Hollywood film Network, some Californians are mad as hell about the state’s inequities and refusing to take it anymore. Between 1987 and 2009 more than one-third of California’s income gain went to the top 1 percent wage earners. Some of those remaining 99 percent are no longer simply festering in their discontent. They are organizing, protesting, “occupying” public property, demanding equal justice, and launching Facebook campaigns to challenge the abuses of corporate power.

A young California woman living in Echo Park, indignant about Bank of America’s announced plan to charge a five-dollar monthly debit card fee, spearheaded a national campaign to encourage people to move their money from large US banks to local nonprofit credit unions. Not only did thousands of depositors follow her lead, Bank of America abandoned their proposed fee hike a month later.13 The message? If you can’t beat the 1 percent bastards, join with like-minded instigators and call a new ball game.

Novelist James Cain, the East Coast transplant who became a master of California literary noir, once predicted that the “vaulting ambitions” of the Golden State would surely generate interesting social progress. “Streams are meeting here that ought to churn up some exciting whirlpools.”14 Indeed.

Riding out of the rocky hinterlands at the helm of a guerilla band of outlaws, Tiburcio Vasquez left a legacy that eclipsed his earthly crimes. A hero of resistance to his admirers, a thieving killer to his enemies, there is no question he made his mark on a land still divided today by discrimination, language, color, and class. Even the state map acknowledges his presence: Vasquez Rocks, a region in northern Los Angeles County where his gang used to hide out, is now a park named in his honor.

In 1939 Judge Hubbell’s daughter loaned the Vasquez rifle to her new son-in-law, Fred Runyon, a young publisher who wanted to display the historic firearm in the windows of his Pasadena Independent newspaper offices to impress readers. Sure enough, the bandit was still a headliner sixty-five years after his hanging. And yet, despite a notoriety that has stretched across three centuries, the man is long gone. It is the place that inspired his passion which endures. Ultimately, all of us who call ourselves Californians are merely visitors. Only the land, this vast earthquake-veined land of disastrous faults and breathtaking beauty, is eternal. The land …

… and the hope that one day there will again be enough.

Notes

1. George Beers, “The Robber Vasquez,” Los Angeles Times, 29 December 1889.

2. John Boessenecker, Bandido: The Life and Times of Tiburcio Vasquez (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010).

3. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III.

4. Gale Holland and Sam Quiones, “Waving California Good-bye,” Los Angeles Times, 27 November 2011.

5. Alana Semuels and Duke Helfand, “6 Million in State Live in Poverty,” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 2011.

6. Noam Levy, “State’s Ills May Weaken Health Reform,” Los Angeles Times, 15 September 2011.

7. Alana Semuels, “Jobless Rate Hits 12.1% in California,” Los Angeles Times, 17 September 2011.

8. George Skeleton, “Lumps of Coal All Around,” Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2011.

9. Larry Gordon, “UC Tuition May Rise to 16% a Year,” Los Angeles Times, 15 September 2011.

10. Aristotle, Nichomean Ethics.

11. Erick Galindo, “Group Seeks Foreclosure Justice,” Pasadena Star-News, 17 June 2011.

12. Alejandro Lazo, “Housing Defaults Up In August,” Los Angeles Times, 15 September 2011.

13. Stuart Pfeifer and E. Scott Reckard “Interest Grows in Bank Transfer Day,” Los Angeles Times, 5 November 2011.

14. James M. Cain, “Paradise,” American Mercury, March 1933.

by Todd Holmes

From Boom Winter 2011, Vol. 1, No. 4

The career of Thomas Kuchel and the advent of the Reagan right

Thundering applause pierced the frigid Connecticut air on the evening of February 23, 1965, echoing from the brownstone gothic building that towered on the edge of Yale’s central campus. Inside, Senator Thomas Kuchel addressed a sea of navy blue blazers otherwise known as the Yale Political Union, discussing the state of the Republican Party and the “suicidal tragedy” he deemed Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential nomination. “Republicans lost because they did not keep faith with their basic principles,” the senator declared, taking pointed aim at the rising influence of the GOP’s far-right contingent. Characterizing the November election as a “repudiation of a party which … [had] forgotten its heritage,” Kuchel warned that the rightward drift of the party must be stemmed at all costs. “If the grand old Republican Party were to become a shriveled, shrunken, impotent political haven for an anachronistic few, then vast changes, and not for the good, would enter our way of life.”1

Kuchel’s statement presages the significant shifts in the Republican Party since 1965. Not long after his remarks, voices of critique and concern within the GOP became persecuted and then silenced. By the end of the 1960s, a liberal consensus was giving way to the conservative phenomenon known as Reaganism. At the forefront in fighting America’s right turn were traditional Republicans like Kuchel.

In his thirty-two-year political career, Thomas Kuchel was a California Republican in the Hiram Johnson and Earl Warren mold—a progressive who championed reform, responsible government, and a bipartisan politics of moderation. In today’s era of Reagan centennials, Fox News, and Tea Party marches, Republicans like Kuchel stand all too forgotten in the political consciousness of twenty-first century Americans. His 101st birthday this past August offers an opportunity to reflect on both the current Republican Party and the proud progressive tradition of California Republicanism that was fought for and lost amid the rise of Reaganism.

Born and raised in Anaheim, California, Thomas Kuchel began his Republican political career fresh out of University of Southern California law school at the young age of twenty-six. First elected to represent Orange County in the State Assembly in 1936, Kuchel would continue to climb California’s political ladder, serving as State Senator (1941–1945), State Controller (1946–1953), and finally United States Senator upon Governor Earl Warren’s 1953 appointment. In the Senate, Kuchel wore the progressive stripes of California Republicanism proudly—a stark contrast to the suburban warriors who would later make his home region of Orange County identifiable with the Conservative Right. “Progressive Republicans,” he recalled, “brought to politics the philosophy of governing for the many.” Over the next fifteen years, Kuchel followed this principle by playing key roles in the passage of the Interstate Highway Act, the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Leading a “baker’s dozen” of progressive Republicans in the Senate, Kuchel even helped provide the necessary margin for passage of Lyndon Johnson’s Social Security and Medicare programs. As the ranking member of the Senate Interior Committee, he sponsored numerous laws to create and expand wildlife refuges and national parks, including Northern California’s Redwood National Park. Indeed, Kuchel enjoyed strong support in both California and the US Senate. He was the last Senate nominee in California to win all fifty-eight counties and the only senator elected Assistant Minority Leader five consecutive times.2

Kuchel’s brand of progressive Republicanism claimed deep roots in the political soils of California. Contrary to the liberal-Democrat persona often ascribed today, the Republican Party commanded an influential majority in the Golden State for most of the twentieth century, guiding much of California’s development in the areas of industry, education, conservation, and social reform. At the forefront of the state’s GOP stood Hiram Johnson, the two-term governor (1911–1917) and long-time US Senator (1917–1945) for California. Considered one of the founders of American Progressivism, Johnson crafted a type of Republicanism that balanced conservative and liberal ideals, championing responsible economic development and fiscal policy on one hand, and an agenda of social-political reform, conservation, and state funded programs on the other. Just as Johnson created the foundation of California’s Progressive Republicanism, Earl Warren (governor 1943–1953) helped guide it through the Democratic era of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Indeed, Warren continued to champion the balanced politics crafted by Johnson. Yet in the age of Roosevelt, he also pushed to have bipartisan cooperation brought into the fold of the state’s GOP—a moderate political thrust Warren trumpeted as “independent,” “nonpartisan,” and placing “citizenship above partisanship.”3

It was upon this California landscape, and among these influential progressive Republicans, that Thomas Kuchel grew up and cut his political teeth. In his youth, he read both the Congressional and State Legislature records daily to his father, studying the politics of Hiram Johnson as well as adopting his strong independence and calculated style of debate—a style that on the high school debate team helped Kuchel defeat an opponent from Fullerton named Richard Nixon. Under the mentorship of Earl Warren as both state legislator and Controller, Kuchel also learned the art of balanced politics and bipartisan compromise that had long guided California’s GOP majority. To be sure, it was this brand of Republicanism that Kuchel brought to the United States Senate, and others like Dwight Eisenhower sought to adopt on the national level. As Kuchel later defined it in a televised speech, Progressive Republicanism was a “combination of liberal and conservative … conservative in dealing with the people’s money, liberal in dealing with human problems.”4

By the early 1960s, however, Thomas Kuchel began to confront what he deemed as an “evil and offensive” danger to both America and the traditional principles of his beloved Republican Party. The menace he fought was neither communists nor the counterculture, but the conservative right and groups like the John Birch Society who threatened the balanced politics of Progressive Republicanism. Charging to the Senate floor in May 1963, Kuchel in his characteristic independence issued one of the first Republican denunciations of right-wing extremism, warning his colleagues to heed the rising “danger of hate and venom, of slander and abuse generated by … [a] handful of zealots, in the ranks of self-styled ‘I am a better American than you are’ organizations.” To Kuchel, these “fear peddlers” of the far right not only “degraded America … [but also] defiled the honorable philosophy of conservatism.” Undoubtedly, far-right corrosion of the GOP stood at the heart of Kuchel’s concern. In a July 1963 letter to Congress, the California senator stressed his intention to defend the traditional principles of the Republican Party from right-wing co-option. “I shall continue to speak out against those who call themselves ‘Republicans’ but who … would change our Grand Old Party from one of constructive reason … into a zany and dangerous voice espousing abolition of the income tax, white supremacy, preventative war, the break-up of NATO, or similar nonsense.”5

Kuchel’s stance in 1963 was a heightened defense of the traditional Republican principles he had advanced since the late 1950s. He had publicly defended his mentor, California Governor-turned-US Chief Justice Earl Warren, against red-baiting slurs and right-wing threats of impeachment, and roundly condemned Birch Society founder Robert Welch for calling President Eisenhower a communist. In the 1962 California gubernatorial race, Kuchel even refused to endorse GOP candidate Richard Nixon due to his rightward stray from the party’s center. Such political abstention, however, reached new heights in 1964. After an unsuccessful attempt to deliver the GOP presidential nomination to fellow moderate Nelson Rockefeller, the California senator shunned conservative nominee Barry Goldwater. Labeling Goldwater’s nomination a “tragic interlude” of “intellectual sterility,” the independent Kuchel premised his silence on the continued defense of traditional Republicanism. “I consider myself the Republican,” he declared. “I consider what Barry Goldwater was saying hardly Republican doctrine.” Kuchel cited similar criteria for his refusal to endorse conservative George Murphy in his successful run for California’s other US Senate seat that same year, underscoring the chasm between party loyalty and Republican principles. In Kuchel’s words, “I never coveted public office enough to become a wholesale hypocrite.”6

By 1966, Kuchel’s fight to protect the Republican Party from far-right corrosion collided head-on with the gubernatorial aspirations of conservative candidate Ronald Reagan. Well financed and directed by a consortium of corporate conservatives, Reagan’s campaign trumpeted a new version of Republicanism—one that spurned the traditional ideal of progressives like Kuchel. It was a corporate conservatism whose tenets of pro-business, antilabor, antireform, and the racial status quo Reagan articulated on a range of issues, from Watts and Open Housing (Proposition 14) to Berkeley and César Chávez’s farmworker movement. Aghast at a Republican candidate he deemed extremist, unqualified, and well outside the GOP mainstream, Kuchel threw his political weight behind San Francisco’s moderate Republican Mayor George Christopher. Upon Reagan’s primary victory, however, the progressive senator touted his Warren-like independence and settled back into the familiar posture of political silence. Kuchel’s refusal to endorse Ronald Reagan’s bid for the California governorship scored national headlines and further placed the thirty-year Republican veteran in the crosshairs of the New Right. Just two months before Reagan announced his candidacy, Kuchel had continued to publicly censure the “so-called Republican groups in California,” characterizing right-wing demands like privatizing Social Security, abrogating the Nuclear Test Ban treaty, and repealing the federal income tax as “far more in keeping with Fascism than Americanism.” Now refusing to support the New Right’s favorite son saddled him with an ultimatum from conservatives and party loyalists alike: “support the party’s nominee in 1966,” one newspaper paraphrased, “or face political extinction in 1968.” Such threats emanated particularly from California GOP chairman Gaylord Parkinson, causing an indignant Kuchel to demand “who the hell is Parkinson” to attempt such “intimidation.” Speaking to reporters two weeks before the election, Kuchel announced that he would take his chances in 1968, affirming he would not under any circumstances endorse Ronald Reagan.7

Kuchel offered no apologies for his lack of support in the wake of Reagan’s victory. “I called my signals as I saw them,” he told reporters after the election. “No one leads this senator around with a ring through his nose.” Yet, as Kuchel pledged to continue advancing a “forward-looking Republicanism,” the corporate conservatives amassing under the new Reagan Administration in Sacramento held other plans. Labeled the Kitchen Cabinet by the press, the consortium of conservative businessmen backing Ronald Reagan—Holmes Tuttle, Henry Salvatori, A.C. Rubel, Leonard Firestone, and Justin Dart—set out to eliminate, in Reagan’s words, “that damn Tommy Kuchel.” Within a year, Reagan’s backers had propped up conservative Max Rafferty to challenge the incumbent senator, waging a primary campaign that some pundits deemed “vicious” and “far below minimum standards of decent political behavior.” Red-baiting slurs and ferocious fabrications emanated from the Rafferty camp, all propelled by a war chest of over $1 million—an insurmountable sum for Kuchel, who often remarked that his refusal to stomach the pageantry of campaign fundraising was his “Achilles’ heel.” In the face of the conservative onslaught, the senator continued to cling to his political roots. “There are certain elements of the Republican Party who have seen fit to denounce me,” Kuchel wrote one constituent, “but I have no intention of compromising the political principles I have followed for thirty years.” The primary election of June 5, 1968, proved one of California’s darkest days. While gunshots had taken the life of Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, the corporate conservatives had defeated Thomas Kuchel, sounding the death knell of California’s progressive Republicanism. In New York for Kennedy’s funeral days later, an aging Earl Warren embraced his younger protégé, telling Kuchel “I just feel so badly about your defeat. I can’t talk about it.”8

In assessing the impact of Kuchel’s primary loss, the Los Angeles Times observed that California “will suffer from the short-sightedness of those who voted against him.” Indeed, the Times’ words, like the many warnings of Kuchel, have proved prescient. In today’s GOP-fueled landscape, the “fear peddlers” still operate, the corporate interests still dominate, and the moderate, progressive stripe of California Republicanism now only emanates as a historical artifact from the political graveyard. In remembrance of Thomas Kuchel’s 101st birthday, let us pause and reflect on a tradition lost and an honorable public servant who stood as one of the most costly political casualties of Reaganism’s rise.9

Notes

1. “Sen. Kuchel Asks Students to Help Build ‘Viable’ GOP,” Yale Daily News, 24 February 1965, 1; “Chafee, Kuchel, Scott Talk to Students on GOP,” Yale Daily News, 24 February 1965, 1; “The Choice is Yours,” Kuchel Speech at Yale University, 23 February 1965, Political Folder, Box 245, Thomas H. Kuchel Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

2. Rep. Stephen Horn, “Honoring A True Public Servant: Senator Thomas Kuchel,” Congressional Record, 107 cong., 10 October 2002, E1856–59; “O.C. Politician and Ex-Senator Kuchel, 84, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1994, 1; “Thomas H. Kuchel Dies at 84,” New York Times, 18; Thomas Henry Kuchel, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=K000335 [accessed May 2011]. For more on the far right in Orange County, see Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2001). Kuchel is mentioned only three times in the book.

3. Democrats did not gain a majority in California politics until 1959. See Olin, Spencer. California’s Prodigal Sons: Hiram Johnson and the Progressives, 1911–1917 (Berkeley, 1968); William Deverell and Tom Sitton, eds., California Progressivism Revisited (Berkeley, 1994), especially Jackson Putnam, “The Progressive Legacy in California,” 247–63. Warren for Governor Non-Partisan Committee memo, 20 July 1942; Warren Campaign Ad, 1942, 1942 Gubernatorial Campaign F3640:443; Warren Reelection Announcement, 15 March 1946, 1946 Gubernatorial Campaign Files F3640:572, Earl Warren Papers, California State Archives.

4. “Thomas Kuchel—Class of 1928” Anaheim High School Alumni Association, http://www.anaheimcolonists.com/hall-of-fame/2009-inductees/thomas-kuchel [accessed 22 July 2011]; “O.C. Politician and Ex-Senator Kuchel, 84, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1994, 1; Stephen Cummings and Patrick Reddy, California After Arnold (New York, 2009), 64; Thomas Kuchel 1968 speech, NBC Television, http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/5110206AA2082_035.do [accessed 22 July 2011].

5.Thomas Kuchel, “Fright Peddlers,” Congressional Record, 88 cong., 2 May 1963, 7636–42; Kuchel Letter to Congress, 29 July 1963, Political Folder, Box 245, Kuchel Papers.

6.”O.C. Politician and Ex-Senator Kuchel, 84, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1994, 1; “Chafee, Kuchel, Scott Talk to Students on GOP,” Yale Daily News, 24 February 1965, 1; “Who’s the Republican Extremist?” Riverside Press, Goldwater File, Box 262, Kuchel Papers.

7. “Republicans Warn Kuchel to Support Reagan,” Houston Tribune, 23 June 1966, GOP 1966 Folder, Box 262; “Kuchel Letter to Republicans,” 6 October 1965, Political Folder, Box 242, Kuchel Papers; “Sen. Kuchel Out on Limb in California,” Boston Globe, 17 July 1966, A5; “Angry Kuchel Assails State GOP Chairman,” Los Angeles Times, 4 June 1966, 4; “Kuchel, Will Not Aid Reagan,” New York Times, 25 October 1966, 22; “UPI Release,” 25 October 1966, Reagan Folder, Box 263, Kuchel Papers.

8. “Reagan Non-Support Upheld by Kuchel,” Baltimore Sun, 2 December 1966, A7; “Kuchel Indicates He’ll Ignore Critics,” Los Angeles Times, 2 December 1966, 3; “Dump Kuchel Plan by Reaganites,” Sacramento Bee, 21 September 1966, Reagan Folder, Box 263, Kuchel Papers; “Reagan to Goldwater,” 11 November 1966, Folder 5-Reagan, Box 18, Barry Goldwater Papers, Arizona Historical Society, Tempe, AZ; “Tom Moore Political Analysis,” 21 August 1968, Kreps Folder, Box 515, Alan Cranston Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; “Rafferty Lists Election Spending of $1 Million,” Los Angeles Times, 10 July 1968, 27; “Kuchel to Rosenberg, 29 February 1968, Campaign ’68 “R”, Box 271, Kuchel Papers; “O.C. Politician and Ex-Senator Kuchel, 84, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1994, 1.

9. “Sen. Kuchel: A Loss for California,” Los Angeles Times, 7 October 1968, A4.

by Chris Carlsson

From Boom Fall 2011, Vol. 1, No. 3

A movement founder explains the deep roots of Critical Mass

California is world-famous as the home of car culture, the place that gave birth to freeways, cruising, hot rods, and the whole mash-up of beaches, girls, convertibles, and teenage fun. That’s one story and it has some truth to it, but it’s a story of the twentieth century. The successful marketing of this image in films and literature—branding California as a car-obsessed state in which life unfolds mostly behind the wheel—has profoundly shaped the aspirations of people around the world. But it has also obscured another story that both precedes and succeeds the rise of the private automobile—the bicycle.

Given the rising tide of climate chaos rooted in fossil fuel combustion, it’s urgent that we tell ourselves other stories about our lives here in the Golden State. Such stories can point us toward viable alternatives that, coincidentally, are well-rooted in the state’s own history.

In September 1992, after months of tentative and speculative conversation about bicycling and politics among a couple of dozen friends (only a year and a half after the bombastic but fragile New World Order emerged in the first Gulf War), the first Critical Mass took place in San Francisco. I was one of those first forty-eight riders and had been intimately involved in the informal discussions that gave rise to it. The first ride didn’t yet have the name; they called it “Commute Clot.” Two months later, the more compelling “Critical Mass,” taken from a casual description of Chinese traffic patterns in Ted White’s documentary “Return of the Scorcher,” was adopted. The ride began with a simple goal: to fill the streets with bikes so completely that they would displace cars, and in so doing would create a new kind of mobile, temporary public space. The obvious irony of the concept lay in the fact that the streets of our cities are the closest thing we have to a genuine public space, but they are so dominated by the parking and movement of private automobiles that the use of the space is predetermined and markedly antisocial.

Nineteenth-Century Bicycling
The second bicycling club nationally and the first on the west coast was the San Francisco Bicycle Club, founded on December 13, 1876. The club petitioned the Park Commission for permission to ride their new-fangled devices in Golden Gate Park. The park commissioners, overcoming their astonishment that there was actually a club for wheelmen, allowed them to “enter Golden Gate Park at the Stanyan Street entrance to the South Drive before 7 A.M. only.” Intensive self-policing kept the wheelmen within the bounds of the variance, and before too long the “privileges were extended.”1 But it was in the next decade that bicycling began its precipitous takeoff. In the words of one contemporary:

The mass of nineteenth-century cyclists in San Francisco were not narrowly focused on bicycling alone. They became the backbone of a broad movement for improved streets and “Good Roads.” On July 25, 1896, thousands of cyclists filled the streets in the largest demonstration seen in the city’s history. In that century’s last decade, San Francisco was a muddy, dirty town, long past its glory years as a boomtown, but still one of the ten largest cities in the United States. The streets were full of horseshit, and between the ubiquitous cable car slots and the tangled web of streetcar rails, pedestrians and bicyclists had a hazardous course to traverse en route to their destinations. After months of organizing among the thriving bicycling clubs of the city, a huge parade was organized that drew as many as 100,000 spectators. Hank Chapot re-creates the scene:

The movement for Good Roads would dovetail with the early progressive efforts to recalibrate government to provide services to the citizenry. After decades of parsimonious government expenditures in a climate that eschewed taxation in favor of privatization through franchises to provide public benefits (water, electricity, telephones, streetcars, etc.), new political actors in the 1890s turned against the big corporations and trusts. San Francisco politicians embraced the bicyclists’ demand for Good Roads along with a growing interest in public water, electricity, and transportation.

Meanwhile, in Southern California, an elegant bikeway was built along the Arroyo Seco corridor north of the Los Angeles River in 1900. It was the keystone of a plan to link Los Angeles and Pasadena with an eight-mile “great transit artery.” Pasadena Mayor Horace Dobbins dedicated public funds to an elevated, multilane, wooden cycleway, including streetlights and gazebo turnouts. The fifteen-cent toll didn’t dissuade hundreds of cyclists who showed up to the opening, going on to ride through a beautiful pre-urban Los Angeles landscape. More than 20 percent of the population were already regular bikers in 1900, and of course the weather was ideal. Cycleways were going to crisscross the area and provide a stylish and modern system for personal transport.4

As the twentieth century unfolded, the automobile rushed into the picture. Within a few years, bikeway expansion was scrapped and even the Arroyo Seco Cycleway was soon turned into a motorway (now better known as the Pasadena Freeway). As thousands of Californians became motorists, patterns of city life began to change. The chaotic crisscrossing of pedestrians, horses and horse-drawn wagons, streetcars, cable cars, and steam railroads, already joined by increasing numbers of bicyclists, now saw an influx of private automobiles.

The crowded, diseased, and dangerous streets of the nineteenth century were an additional motivation for progressive leaders who sought to ameliorate these conditions through efficient city planning, then a new discipline. As city centers choked with traffic congestion and automobile injuries and deaths soared, a struggle to reshape city streets took place. Police and parents wanted to control speeds to promote safety. Highway engineers wanted to widen and streamline city streets to promote through traffic at higher speeds. Auto companies promoted the “freedom of the open road” and claimed that street improvements must properly be directed to bettering driving conditions, since most of the money for road building and maintenance was derived from gasoline taxes. Bicycles and pedestrians were the obvious losers in this era as highway engineers—reinforced by auto industry propaganda—focused on widening streets, increasing parking, and creating parkways and highways (later freeways), while society subtly shifted the blame for car-related fatalities to careless pedestrians and cyclists, or individual bad drivers.5

In the late 1960s, after decades of car ascendancy, with the bicycle reduced in popular imagination to a children’s toy or an obscure sport, the bicycle began to assume its modern significance. An early breakthrough came in the bucolic university town of Davis, California, where in 1965 five locals formed a vaguely named “Bicycle Safety Committee” to save the imperiled cycling community. Davis was growing by 10 percent a year, and bicyclists were diminishing as the population was growing. The committee mapped a bike lane system for Davis, and after being thwarted by a hostile City Council managed to elect a pro-bicycling Council in 1966. Davis’s reputation as California’s best-known cycling town dates from that time, when local government gave a green light to a new network of bike lanes. Interestingly, during the first few years of trial and error, a separated bike lane between parked cars and the sidewalk was tried and discarded as unsafe, a system that has been successfully implemented in Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam, and other European cities.6

A few years later, in 1969, hundreds of cyclists gathered in the first “Smog-Free Locomotion Day” demonstration on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. For the next few years, this ecological protest bike ride rolled through the East Bay before sputtering out in the wake of the first oil crisis and the slow unraveling of the protest era.

In the 1980s, bicycle activism hit a low ebb until the end of the decade when San Francisco bike messengers organized a mass ride to encircle City Hall. The messengers were protesting the mayor and police threats to crack down on scofflaw messengers and force them to register and become licensed. The protest succeeded, and the plans to license messengers were abandoned. In 1990 a new group, Bay Area Bike Action, organized a bike ride through Golden Gate Park to advocate for a “park, not a parking lot!” During the first Gulf War in 1991, dozens of cyclists appeared at the periphery of large antiwar demonstrations in the city and pioneered a role for themselves as scouts, rolling ahead of marchers to see where police might be waiting for them. Finally, a group of fifty cyclists rode together from Santa Cruz to San Francisco during this same period, protesting the invasion of Kuwait and the bombing of Iraq.

Critical Mass Is Born in San Francisco, 1992
From these many threads through time, the first Critical Mass rode in San Francisco in September, 1992. While few of the first riders, if any, knew of their complicated legacy, they were resuming an honorable, century-old tradition of combining bicycling with politics. The several dozen Critical Mass initiators had different tastes, ideas, politics, and experiences. Some of us had been active in ecological efforts, others in antiwar and antinuclear campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, a few were bike messengers, while others still were people who simply chose bikes as their preferred transportation. We made no effort to arrive at a consensus explanation for our action, but hoped that in the space we planned to open, many ideas could flourish and many purposes find their expression. We all agreed that the maltreatment and second-class citizenship we suffered as isolated everyday cyclists deserved a robust response; and if nothing else, by gathering and riding en masse, we would make our presence felt as it hadn’t been felt before.

It was obvious that if any formal organization took responsibility for the event, city authorities would most likely insist they have a permit and probably liability insurance, so we proceeded anonymously. We chose not to approach the police or the local government, defining the gathering as “an organized coincidence.” That proved to be a fortuitous decision, since no one could be held personally responsible for the gathering of dozens, then hundreds, and eventually thousands of citizens, all determined to use the public thoroughfares to “ride home together,” paralleling the utterly banal and normalized traffic jams that clogged the streets every day with cars. The slogan that emerged after awhile was “We aren’t blocking traffic, we ARE traffic!” (This also became the title of Ted White’s 1998 documentary on Critical Mass.7) Moreover, since no individual or organization “owned” the ride, it was easy for anyone to feel it was theirs as much as anyone else’s.

What none of us could know in that dry autumn and winter of 1992–1993, as the police took no notice of us and our numbers swelled toward a couple hundred riders by February, was that the idea had become a classic meme, spreading from person to person through phone calls, through letters, through visitors who rode with us and took the idea back to their hometowns. (A Polish expat in San Francisco told his old friends in Poznan, Poland, who may have had the first ride in Europe.) About eight of us put together a small pamphlet, “How to Make a Critical Mass,”8 which we sent out to anyone who requested it, only a couple of dozen by the end of 1993.

Coincidentally, 1993 was also the year that the World Wide Web began to have a real presence in our lives, especially in San Francisco, so email, listserv discussions, and eventually websites began to proliferate. Other Critical Mass rides were started across the bay in Berkeley; in New York; in Austin, Texas; Madison, Wisconsin; Portland, Oregon; and Montreal. The idea began to snowball that year, and people in dozens of other cities and towns started their own Critical Mass rides. They all followed similar ideas to the ones that animated our San Francisco ride from the beginning: no leaders, ideas communicated by way of “xerocracy” (using ubiquitous photo-copying machines, anyone could put their ideas out on a flyer and have influence over the culture and experience of the local ride); sticking together in dense masses of bikes, even if it meant running red lights, for it was safer to stick together than to get spread out and mixed with autos; “corking” side traffic by having one or a few cyclists stop in front of rows of cars to prevent them from encroaching on the Mass; and so on.

In time, dozens of major cities around the world would have Critical Mass bike rides, from Rome and Milan in Italy (along with twenty other cities), to London (and two dozen other United Kingdom locales), Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, São Paulo, Toronto, Vancouver, Budapest, Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne, Paris, Lyon, Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Quito, Santiago, and many more. Each city’s ride took some of the wider concept and made it their own, adapting as needed to local conditions. Some were tightly organized, others less so. Chicago contributed the “bike lift” to the culture, which was later best demonstrated in a Budapest ride of over 40,000 cyclists, all holding their bicycles aloft while cheering wildly. (Budapest had a recent history as a heavily policed “Communist” city; therefore, organizers chose to negotiate with the authorities rather than risk a violent confrontation and decided to hold Critical Mass rides only at the end of April and September, twice a year. This has led them to hold the record for most riders, recently topping 50,000.)

Everyday Bicycling Returns
Critical Mass was, and is, just a starting point. It’s a place where people meet and further projects begin to find adherents, often but not only bicycle-related. In the last decade, dozens of bike “zines” have been published (Mudflap, Bike Love, Chainbreaker, Sin on Wheels, Mercury Rising, to name a few). Lately such quality periodicals as Boneshaker magazine from Bristol, England, Bike Monkey from Santa Rosa, California, Dandyhorse from Toronto, and Momentum from Vancouver, Canada, have given the new bicycling culture aesthetically beautiful, editorially thoughtful media of its own.

Do-it-yourself bike shops, anchored by volunteer labor, have proliferated, too. In Los Angeles, the triumvirate of the Bike Kitchen, the Bike Oven, and the Bikerowave, has helped thousands of Angelenos become daily cyclists. Most recently, the Los Angeles Bicycle Coalition helped spawn La Bici Digna, a do-it-yourself bikeshop for Spanish-speaking day laborers in metropolitan Los Angeles. Similar kinds of efforts are running in San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, and New York, and they have really taken off in Italy, where they’re called “ciclofficine,” and have found ready homes in the network of squatted social centers around the country (Rome alone has at least six such spaces, providing tools and spare parts to all comers to fix—or make—their own bikes). Another half-dozen free bike spaces have emerged in squatted buildings in Madrid.

In recent years, other kinds of rides have also begun, sometimes as deliberate efforts to start social bike rides that don’t have Critical Mass’s anarchistic reputation. This reputation, proliferated by the mass media, is sometimes deserved: a San Diego Critical Mass on Black Friday 2010 rode into a mall and through the aisles of a Target store. Midnight Ridazz in Los Angeles attracts huge crowds of middle-of-the-night riders. A San Jose Bike Party, designed to be law-abiding and respectful while fun and social too, started only a couple of years ago and is attracting thousands of riders to its monthly 8:00 P.M. rides through various Silicon Valley burgs. The East Bay and San Francisco have inaugurated Bike Party rides, in 2010 and 2011 respectively.

In the wake of all this social riding, formal advocacy groups are gaining political power. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, with its couple of dozen volunteers and occasional meetings in restaurants, is now 12,000 dues-paying members strong, and considered by most to be a serious political force in local politics. Similar advocacy groups in Marin County, the East Bay, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles, with more modest memberships, have grown in influence during the past decade. Bicycle boulevards and traffic-calmed streets have been established throughout Berkeley and Davis, and are beginning to get attention from larger cities too, including LA and SF. A long-abandoned railroad tunnel linking Mill Valley to Corte Madera has just been refurbished and opened to bicyclists in Marin County.

Riding alongside mainstream groups are many other activists and initiatives, from CicLAvia in Los Angeles to the Bikes on Board campaign on Caltrain along the San Mateo peninsula, and the new Sunday Streets program in San Francisco. Less than a decade ago Bogotá, Colombia, established Sunday street closures, which have spread to dozens of major cities in South America and are now being adopted in San Francisco, too. Bikeshare programs are also being started. From the well-known Vélib program in Paris to similar bike shares in Copenhagen, Milan, London, and other European centers, the idea has taken hold in Mexico City and is slated to open in San Francisco soon.

Critical Mass captures a larger moment in history, a time when great numbers of people are searching for ways to make personal and political changes in their everyday lives in response to the multiple crises of energy, ecology, economy, and general anomie. Bursting on the scene in cities across the world over the past nearly twenty years, reinvented again and again by dozens of people in widely divergent geographic areas, Critical Mass emerges from a commonality of experience and resonates with popular imagination in a surprisingly wide range of cultures and languages. Dozens of other organizations and initiatives have been launched, sometimes directly from the milieu of Critical Mass cyclists, other times merely as further independent manifestations of the same shifting cultural zeitgeist of which Critical Mass is such a bright signifier. At its simplest level, Critical Mass has led untold numbers of people to abandon their former commute patterns and embrace the bicycle as their everyday transportation. I’ve heard hundreds of anecdotal accounts over the years, from San Francisco to New York, Rome to São Paulo, of people becoming regular bicyclists after trying it first in Critical Mass. But if Critical Mass seems to be a starting point, it’s vital to remember the great antecedents that took place long before anyone riding now was even alive.

The bicycle is the personal vehicle of the twenty-first century. It is an antidote to oil wars, carbon emissions, the obesity epidemic, and tens of thousands of annual highway fatalities. Bicycling puts us into the life of our streets and connects us to friends, neighbors, and strangers in ways that the car culture has blocked for so long. Thousands of Californians have chosen the bicycle, and millions more will as we alter our urban landscapes to welcome and facilitate that choice. Citywide and intercity systems of dedicated bikeways are long overdue. Imagine how many more people would ride if there were safe thoroughfares to make bicycling the most pleasant and direct way to get from anywhere in the city to anywhere else—point A to point B, smelling the flowers, the clean air, hearing the birds, and enjoying your friends and neighbors. Why not?

Notes

1. Ida L. Howard, “When San Francisco Was Teaching America to Ride a Bicycle,” San Francisco Chronicle, 26 February 1905.

2. Ibid.

3. Hank Chapot, “The Great San Francisco Bicycle Protest of 1896,” Processed World 2.001. http://www.archive.org/stream/processedworld2001proc#page/64/mode/2up. Accessed 11 December 2010.

4. http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200803/bikeway.asp.

5. Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 148–164.

6. Dale Lott, “How our bike lanes were born,” http://www.runmuki.com/paul/writing/lottarticle.html. Accessed 31 March 2011.

7. http://www.tedwhitegreenlight.com/critical_mass_film.htm.

8. This document appears in the appendix of the book Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration, ed. Chris Carlsson (Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002) and is available online at two or three websites.