Rolling down under: protesting the proposed fencing off of the people’s hill at New Parliament House, Canberra, Australia. Image credit: Lukas Coch / AAP, reproduced with permission.
An imaginative form of protest took place on the other side of the world in 2017 as some Australians took to rolling down grassy slopes at the heart of the nation’s capital of Canberra.[1] Although it appeared lighthearted, the motivations of these tumbling citizens were quite serious. They were rolling down Parliament Hill, situated at the heart of Canberra’s constellation of avenues and topographic landmarks. They were rolling to exercise an egalitarian ideal that was originally embedded in the design of the New Parliament House.
When conceptualizing the design in the 1980s, the New Parliament House architect Romaldo Giurgola sought to place the people above the parliament, rather than subservient to it. While this ideal has since been expressed in other parliaments—such as Foster and Partner’s gravity defying ramp that spirals above the Reichstag in Berlin—the design for Australia’s Parliament took the radical approach of burying the parliamentary chambers beneath a publicly accessible grassy knoll. This fusion of parliament and landscape sought to embrace the aspirations of all inhabitants and their interdependence with the timeless landscapes of the Island Continent.
The people’s hill: New Parliament House, Canberra, Australia. Image credit: John Gollings, reproduced with permission.
As landscape poetics go, it is a beautiful notion. Yet it is also selective, in the sense that First Australians have never identified with, or felt included in, the narrative of the people’s hill. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, which for almost half a century has continuously occupied the lawn at the foot of Australia’s Parliament House, embodies this implicit exclusion.[2]
This exclusion remains unresolved, with global events overtaking Giurgola’s egalitarian gesture after little more than a quarter of a century in the ground. The concept of the people’s hill was initially eroded with the tightening of security following the trauma of September 11, 2001. Then, in September 2017, the object of the people’s protest materialized: a nine-foot high welded steel security fence was erected around the hill to finish the job once and for all.[3] By sealing the knoll—and its legislature—off from its citizens, the new fence invokes a fortified medieval hill town that has shut the gate on its hinterland.
Shutting the gate on the people’s hill: fencing off New Parliament House, Canberra, Australia. Image credit: Kym Smith / Newspix, reproduced with permission.
And so, the people roll no more. As is also evident in the worldwide barricading of public space to repel vehicular terrorism, fencing off Australia’s Landscape Parliament is deeply symbolic. It reveals a feedback loop, whereby political systems are pushed further and further away, even as the ideal encapsulated in the people’s hill would seem ever more relevant to many political predicaments on other continents, including here in California.
To comprehend why a landscape parliament in the land Down Under was worth rolling for—and why it is relevant to California—entails venturing a thousand years back in time to Iceland. The land of ice and fire is steeped in geysers, glaciers, volcanoes, and Sagas. Amidst this storied landscape lies Iceland’s most hallowed ground, where from the year 930 to 1798, Thingvellir (Þingvellir) served as the dramatic venue for the world’s first parliament. Unlike the climate-controlled buildings that house contemporary political forums, Iceland’s parliament was held out under the open sky. Each year, Icelanders gathered amid the rocky fissures formed by diverging tectonic plates to discuss important matters of concern.[4]
Site of the ancient landscape parliament of Thingvellir, Iceland. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
In reference to its topographic setting, the name Þingvellir translates loosely as meeting valley in English. And while the correlation between vellir and valley is evident, understanding the other half of the name is more complicated. Although Þing is etymologically connected to the English word thing, it is unlike anything we know today. In Old Norse, Þings referred to landscape-based forums for discussing important community matters. Indeed, while the dramatic setting and near millennium of constant use make Thingvellir the most celebrated example, Thing parliaments were established in many locations throughout the Viking world. Their names live on in places such as Gulating in Norway, Tingwalla in Sweden, Tinganes in the Faroe Islands, Tingwall in Shetland and Orkney, and Tynwald on the Isle of Man.
The etymology of Þing can also be traced further back to the ancient Germanic proto-parliamentary Ding.[5] Referring to a general assembly or court of law in Old High German, Dings were often sited in topographically prominent locations that typically included megaliths, springs, or distinctive trees. These meanings were also absorbed into English, with traces of Þing and Ding still retained in thing, in the sense that we might say that someone “knows a thing or two” to imply that they comprehend the issues at hand.[6]
But these traces hang by a thread. In today’s industrialized world, we are far more likely to understand things as the many inanimate objects that surround us with our own indifference. Today, things are just the peripheral stuff that we overlook and often can’t be bothered to call by name. We might run an errand to “buy some things” or observe that we “forgot something.” And as the Internet of Things vaporizes our interaction with everyday appliances into the Cloud, our collective ambivalence towards things seems destined to increase.
Dispensing with things. Self Portrait as Revealed by Trash: 365 days of photographing everything I threw out, gallery exhibit, 2004-2008, Tim Gaudreau. Image credit: Tim Gaudreau, reproduced with permission.
To understand why the language of things changed so profoundly over the centuries—from the discussion of important matters to the trivialization of dispensable objects—entails travelling again. Even as Thingvellir’s parliament continued to operate within the unique and isolated landscapes of Iceland, things were subject to new forces of transformation in Continental Europe. As Europe modernized and political control centralized, the process of land enclosure began to displace the feudal commons that Thing parliaments had traditionally occupied. With no place left in the landscape, Thing parliaments moved undercover, and in time, into the fully enclosed buildings that inhabitants of the industrialized world take for granted today.[7]
In addition to parliaments, other culturally significant forums such as markets, performance spaces, and religious ceremonies also came in from the cold. Extrapolating this process to the present day, enclosure takes the form of industrially scaled agriculture within endless fields of climate-controlled hydroponic greenhouses.
The Sea of Plastic: the fully enclosed agricultural landscape of Mar del Plástico, Almeria, Spain. Image credit: George Steinmetz, reproduced with permission.
Whereas Things once referred to landscape-based community assemblies for discussing important issues, the enclosure of these forums led to things becoming understood more as the objects that surround them. With things now conceived more as objects than as issues, this shift also had profound implications for conceptions of landscape. Divested of its thingness, the landscape became more of a passive receptacle of physical things than a political Thing inherently.[8] So much so, that today it is hard to imagine landscape in any other way than as a benign scene or as ‘threatened’ nature in need of human assistance.
In this world, the landscape bears the scars of objects and events, but no longer takes a seat in the parliament that it once cultivated. And despite the promise of a seamless globe in which humans, capital, and wildebeest move without friction, the landscape is riven with more fissures than ever before.[9] These divisions take the form of walls between nation states, infrastructural ruptures within communities, socio-economic inequality, fragmentation of ecological biomes, and so forth.
Gathering at the edges: migrants attempting to cross the Macedonian Border from Greece, 2015. Image credit: Nikos Arvanitidis, reproduced with permission.
And yet, many of the most pressing issues that define the present Age of the Anthropocene transcend these barriers with impunity.[10] Walls do not readily circumscribe global warming, nuclear radiation, antibiotic resistance, non-biodegradable plastics, or global human migration. And unlike the everyday things that surround us all, these hyper-things are so vast and enduring that they often defy human scales of comprehension. They reveal a yawning gulf between our hazy awareness of the things that matter and our limited capacity to discuss, let alone address them.[11]
What to do? The issue here is one of horizons. From within houses of legislature or parliament, our shared political horizons are simply too inhibited to accommodate the scale and scope of the Anthropocene. In response, a city, a state, a nation, or even a coalition of nations, may seek to construct more expansive parliaments under which to gather ever-larger political assemblies.[12] And yet, even if these forums were to rival in enormity the largest sporting stadiums on Earth, they would still be buildings. And as buildings, they remain historically bound to the enclosure of political gatherings, and subsequent diminishment of Things into things.
For all their proficiency in keeping the rain out and the politicians in, buildings can never truly become Things. How, then, might the ancient conception of the landscape parliament be re-imagined to stretch our shared political horizons in order to more adequately encompass contemporary matters of concern? That is, how might some of the lost agency of landscape be rediscovered within the political process? How might some of the Thingness of things be recovered?
This is not to imply that Californians begin dissolving Capitol Hills and City Halls and repatriating venues of governance out into the landscape in a futile attempt at refashioning Thingvellir. It is not possible to just go back and recreate Things because the nature of contemporary political processes and assemblies has profoundly changed. To take Things literally in this way would probably just add to the assortment of unused public amphitheaters that unwittingly reify nostalgic yearnings for community congregations of yesteryear.
Taking Things literally: abandoned amphitheater, Foster Park, Ventura County, California. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
Nor is cultivating Thingness in landscape akin to invoking some form of animism that imbues inanimate objects with a mystical life force. And to be clear, re-connecting landscape and politics has nothing to do with the “blood and soil” that the Third Reich used to such catastrophic effect by weaponizing the power of place on an industrial scale. What it is about is feeling connected to a process. It is about leveraging the public landscape to embolden the public in politics.[13]
To begin this process, the first instinct may be to take down the fences. De-fencing parliaments and legislatures would be a revolution of sorts. It suggests comparisons with the eighteenth and nineteenth century process of dis-parking, whereby the royal hunting grounds of Europe were gradually opened up to public use.[14] This process was initiated by unlocking the gates, and ultimately—as Californians now take for granted in city parks that remain open 24/7—demolishing the boundary walls altogether.
If we return Down Under for a moment and think through dis-parking Australia’s freshly fortified landscape parliament, the flaw in this venture becomes apparent. To remain functional in the current climate, new, more sophisticated, invisible, and insidious forms of security would almost inevitably emerge to offset a de-fenced the house of the legislature. Albeit at a vaster scale, this phenomenon is demonstrated along the US southern border. From California to Texas, the heavily surveilled and profiled 100-mile-wide thickened zone that shadows the border puts fences and walls in context; material expressions of a more pervasive filtering process that occurs before a traveler even knows they have arrived and persists long after they think they have left.
And as the deplorable scenes from the January 2021 breaching of the US Capitol demonstrate, even the most hallowed ramparts can be scaled with sufficient incitement. As at the border, the walls of the Capitol proved more performative than impervious; something reassuringly concrete to assail as a diversion from thinking though what one hopes to accomplish once inside. Here, as at Australia’s parliament, walls and fences are a symptom not a cause. The parliament’s fence is going to remain somewhere; if not encircling the building in full view, then as a thickened zone on the margins, or, more perniciously, as a wall in the minds of those who feel shut out from the political process.[15]
US/Mexico border zone, Jacumba Hot Springs, California. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
Instead of deconstructing the walls and roofs of official houses of parliament and legislature of the State (only for other more pervasive barriers to raise in their place), a more constructive path could lay in devolving landscape parliaments as parallel processes. That is, perhaps the role of landscape Things today is not to be reprised as (non)representative parliaments for making laws, but to operate as moral shadow parliaments for discussing the issues that really matter; issues that dithering bricks-and-mortar parliaments and legislatures seem to habitually forfeit under the weight of earmarks and the fog of obfuscation.
With Things no longer satisfactorily represented in conventional parliaments and legislatures, where might these shadow landscape parliaments be situated? Perhaps everywhere and nowhere, in the sense that today a great deal of political assembly occurs in online forums that transcend borders and censors. But being digitally untethered from time and place has the significant downside of conveniently enabling individuals to insulate themselves from divisive issues within polarized online communities.
Yet even as social media spins its wheels, when people really need their voices heard, they still take to the streets on foot. If these issue-driven gatherings are to stick for any longer than an outrage-news-cycle, momentarily occupying the frictionless ground of polished airport foyers and online echo chambers is insufficient.[16] To stop Things from just slipping away into a capsicum haze of unfulfilled aspirations, landscape shadow parliaments would need to somehow lodge into the fissures that permeate everyday Californian environments. The Occupy Wall Street movement in New York and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Australia’s capital Canberra are recent and continuing precedents for this enduring act of literally digging in on an issue.[17]
Interstitial spaces in Northern California, (top) freeway teardown in Hayes Valley, San Francisco, and (bottom) freeway easement in Santa Rosa, California. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
Although often overlooked in our individual cognitive maps, California’s cultural landscapes are riven with local borderlands that cleave between neighborhoods, discordant land-uses, maintained and derelict sites, and most insidiously, between planning visions and their lived reality.[18]
In many situations, agencies or communities have valid rationales and useful mechanisms with which to heal rifts in the urban fabric. Consider, for example, the re-stitching of San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood following the demolition of the earthquake damaged double-tiered Central Freeway. Yet in other circumstances, adjacent locales march to decidedly different tunes. Consider a neighbourhood ‘on the other side of the tracks’ that is vulnerable to runaway change when the tracks are sunken or removed. Richmond’s Iron Triangle, which circumscribes an underprivileged neighborhood in the shadow of the oil refinery, encapsulates this condition.
In certain circumstances, this latter type of linear no-man’s-land could provide fertile sites for snagging shadow landscape parliaments. Dug into these thin borderland situations, landscape Things could be configured to thicken the jump-cut between two conditions with a third space that is neither one, nor the other. Here, ancient Thingvellir is instructive, with the geological fissures of the Icelandic setting cleaving space between local clans, into which the parliament occupied an interstitial every-man’s-land over which no single clan held jurisdiction.
The parliament of tears: Friendship Park, California/Mexico border at the Pacific Ocean. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
While California’s coastal conurbations are riddled with manmade fissures that suggest potential thickening into landscape Things, one of most potent (and confounding) sites surely lies at the State’s southernmost edge. Friendship Park straddles the US/Mexico border on the last high ground before the border fence spills down into the surf.[19] As one of the few locations where in-person cross-border interaction is condoned for a few hours on weekends, Friendship Park is a place of family reunions, mixed emotions, sit-in protests and coordinated trans-border activities. Twin fences define the site; one on the border, and a second inside US soil. This second fence is furnished with a disproportionately monumental gateway that promises thoroughfare but leads only to no-man’s-land.
Considered in the context of other heavily fortified no-man’s lands in urban areas, one may continue to hope for a future ‘Berlin moment,’ whereby the fortification of California’s southern border is eventually demolished as a relic of history.[20] But in the meantime, working within current geopolitical realities, how might a site such as Friendship Park be thickened into a third space? How might the fledgling aspirations Friendship Park be amplified into a landscape Thing?
At present, the challenges of the site and situation are immense. The fences are too insistent, admission to the controlled no-man’s-land too selective, and the shared horizon glistening out across the Pacific Ocean too bittersweet. Indeed, as the semantic distinction between fences and walls becomes increasingly partisan, the border ‘fence’ at Friendship Park is now so heavily armored with welded mesh—leaving apertures barely wider than a human finger—that it is, in substance, already a ‘wall.’
And although walls ably defended territories for thousands of years, their presence today is decidedly regressive.[21] In the sixteenth century, as medieval fortifications proved increasingly ineffective against advancements in ballistic technology, horizontal defensive earthworks supplanted vertical masonry walls. Reaching its zenith in Europe’s Renaissance star forts, this strategy can still be explored today in the Batteries that were built along the California coast in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the advent of long-range ballistics pushed defensive earthworks to new extremes. As threats materialized from over the horizon in every direction, people retreated underground, relying on the thickness and shape of the land as their primary mode of defense.
Battery Cavallo, Fort Baker, California, circa 1938. Image credit: National Archives and Records Administration, Aerial Photographs Collection, image in the public domain.
This brief fortification primer illuminates the superiority of strategically shaped landform over masonry walls and reinforced fences. By shifting this capability from a defensive to a public conception of space, the shaping of landscape thickness becomes an intriguing proposition. Through the medium of land shaping, what form could a shadow landscape forum at Friendship Park—or elsewhere—take?
Mounding the landscape up into a hill would seem the obvious answer. As was (until recently) possible on Australia’s Parliament House hill, Californians from all walks of life may seek to fabricate the moral high ground from which to better foresee and understand the expansive issues at hand. If the concept of a political horizon is conflated with the physical horizon (as formed by the curvature of the earth), climbing a hill would appear to expand one’s horizons, allowing each of us to see more things—to literally see over the wall.
To take things to the next level, those who are so inclined could go a little higher in the basket of a hot air balloon and expand their political horizons a little further. Or, they could liftoff into the low Earth-orbit of the International Space Station and see what satellites see. Or, like the astronauts on Apollo 17, travel halfway to the moon to catch the lonely blue marble within the single frame of a Hasselblad; revealing that the whole Earth is itself a thing, albeit one that no human can see both sides of at the same time. In the sense that this epiphany energized the environmental movement, humanity has been metaphorically trying to get back down to Earth ever since.[22]
The point is that the higher an individual goes, the more likely they are to feel as though they are on top of things. And yet, from up on the hill (or space station) their horizons defer further outwards, circumscribing more and more issues while leaving them no closer to grasping or acting on the issues that matter. But what if this yearning to climb is upended, and instead of seeking landscape Things up on hills, we think of Things as forming down in hollows? Once again, ancient Thingvellir offers guidance here, with the geologically fissured Icelandic landscape providing a range of crevices that drew in gatherings of varied scale and scope within their embrace.
Through the organizational pull of gravity, hollows instinctively collect things. Consider the dunes on the floor of California’s Death Valley, where over the eons each grain of sand made its way to a gathering of like-minded grains at the lowest point in North America. Or in a more general sense, consider how water—access to which is a defining wall-crossing issue of the twenty-first century—converges fluidly into hollowed out landforms.
And like the water that makes up about 60 percent of our bodily mass, hollows can also collect humans. If the people rolling off Australia’s parliament hill were to repeat their mass tumble from the rim of a hollow, they would all end up drawn together at the bottom. What they may find there could be confronting, since hollows have also served historically as dumping grounds; as places where all the things that humans discard end up, out of sight and out of mind. It turns out that many of these things are still there, decaying on a geological timescale. Confronted with these things, the parliamentary hollow impels its occupants to recall; not in the sense of officially ordering someone (such as a Governor) to return, but in the other sense of bringing an event or situation back into one’s mind.[23]
Hollows foreground these things by compressing space and time by retraining the horizons of those who enter them. When going down into a hollow, everyone’s personal horizon temporarily retracts to the rim of the concave landform.[24] A kind of horizonal hand-over occurs, whereby instead of retreating unceasingly into the distance (and off into the future) as each individual moves around, the horizon stays tethered to the landform. As a result, everyone in the hollow sees the same horizon. That is, they share a collective horizon with the many other things—human, non-human, and inanimate—that are gathered in the present moment.
Gathering things: the horizon as formed by the curvature of the Earth from (top to bottom) on the plain; up on the hill; and down in the hollow. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
The other thing about hollows is that they leak. Through either infiltration or evaporation, hollow landforms leak water (otherwise they would become lakes), and unfortunately hollows often leak toxins when associated with dumping grounds. Yet in a positive sense, hollows also potentially leak people and ideas. In contrast to the illusion of a hermetically sealed leak-proof house of parliament, the landscape parliament shaped as a hollow makes no claims to being watertight. Unlike a wall or fence, the rim that encircles the hollow landform remains permeable. Freed of the limitations that architectural containment places on access and participation, humans, along with many other things, can cross over this topographic threshold and gather to discuss matters of concern. And when the time for discussion has passed and the time for action is present, they can move back over the collective threshold and leave.
Outside of the hollow, the Earth’s horizon comes back into focus and the wider world, with its myriad issues, comes back into play. Out here individuals are potentially primed to extend issues of concern beyond a preoccupation with their own and immediate futures, which from ecological crises to genetic design, encompass vast and miniscule scales and temporalities.
However, potential does not necessarily translate into actuality. While this can be true in any situation, it is doubly so in the landscape. Whereas the programmatic capacity of buildings is reasonably predictable, predetermining the usefulness of a landscape in advance remains an imprecise art.[25] Buildings have doors and roofs with which to encapsulate and regulate the activities of their occupants. Landscape, on the other hand, is less obliging; think of landscape in terms of the vagaries of the weather upon which it is beholden, or in terms of the indeterminate flow of the rivers that run through it.
Fluid horizons: “View of Sacramento City as it appeared during the great inundation in January 1850 / Drawn from nature by Geo. W. Casilear & Henry Bainbridge. New York : Lith. of Sarony c1850.” Source: California State Library, image in the public domain.
The landscape’s inherent uncertainty can be extended to humans, who often do not adopt landscapes in the way in which planners intended. Part of this is undoubtedly down to the preponderance of poorly designed public spaces (in California and elsewhere) that fail both functionally and expressively. Yet even with the best intentions, landscapes can fall flat. In this context, expecting landscape parliaments to routinely perform as places for actual discussion could backfire. The weight of expectation could create intimidating spaces that people completely avoid, unwittingly adding to the existing trove of empty amphitheaters.
Instead of pressuring landscape things to be routinely parliamentary from the outset, perhaps their role needs to be initiated in more down to earth terms. Positioned more humbly, landscape Things would principally seek to simply collect people in situ, essentially drawing each of us out of our internet of things and into the shared world of Things. Once drawn—like moths to a lamp—into the public realm, we are more likely to participate in, and engage with, the issues (or things) that concern us all.
Drawn together: groups around bonfires on Ocean Beach, San Francisco. Image credit: Kim Komenich / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris, reproduced with permission.
From this unassuming basis, in certain situations where particularly potent matters of concern converge on the ground, contemporary landscape Things might emerge. While there is a great deal of indeterminacy involved, we can assume that these Things are unlikely to leaven on Capitol hills. Just as legislatures and issues are not progressing, forums and gatherings are not aligning. The forums that govern Californians are fixed at the center, on the hill, while the gatherings that matter dig in at the edges, in the fissures. It is here that shadow landscape parliaments are at most likely to be at home.
Given that they are not tied to the conventional apparatuses of federal, state, or local governance, to which other scales might landscape shadow parliaments extend? And, in addition to Friendship Park, where else in California might these reimagined landscape shadow parliaments (Things) be dispersed? As nature and politics increasingly converge, perhaps Things might draw within their horizons each of the world’s 867 bioregions, ten of which intersect with California.[26] Or, across the Sierras, perhaps Landscape Parliaments might grip onto the salty banks of the overdrawn Mono Lake, stripped of inflows that are gravity-fed southbound along the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Or, as traditional zoological gardens become less and less defensible, Things might colonize the naturalistic habitats of decommissioned animal exhibits in San Francisco zoo.
Drawn to the edge: Sunken City, Sn Pedro, California. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
Or, perhaps the position of Landscape Parliaments might be calibrated to sea level rise projections: not safely on higher ground, but at the waterline near vulnerable communities such as East Palo Alto, to be intentionally inundated as a wet-feet reality check on rising tides. Or, find niches amidst the fragmented ruins of the aptly named Sunken City near Long Beach, where buildings and streets slumped into the Pacific Ocean. Or, ride the precipice of vanishing ground, by convening Things on the concrete pads of recently demolished buildings atop Pacifica’s rapidly receding cliff line. Or, inhabit the new ground that results when landfill is decommissioned, such as that of the Albany Bulb wasteland that protrudes into the tidelands of San Francisco Bay’s eastern shore.
By gathering Californians together within the contours of these settings, Landscape Things might help us to recall the gravity of the things that matter, nearer to where they matter.
[4] Agust Gudmundsson, ‘Tectonics of the Thingvellir Fissure Swarm, SW Iceland’, Journal of Structural Geology 9/1 (1987): 61–69. Richard Beck, ‘Iceland’s Thousand Year Old Parliament’, Scandinavian Studies and Notes 10/5 (1929): 149–153.
[5] See Kenneth R. Olwig, ‘Liminality, Seasonality and Landscape’, Landscape Research 30/2 (2005): 259–271.
[6] Here I draw on Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in: Albert Hofstadter (trans.), Poetry Language Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 161–180, at 173.
[7] See Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, ‘Urbs in Rure: Historical Enclosure and the Extended Urbanization of the Countryside’, in: Neil Brenner (ed.), Implosions / Explosions (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2014), 236–259.
[8] See Kenneth R. Olwig, ‘Heidegger, Latour and the Reification of Things: The Inversion and Spatial Enclosure of the Substantive Landscape of Things–The Lake District Case’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 95/3 (2013): 251–273, at 256.
[9] See Karl Kullmann, ‘Route Fittko: Tracing Walter Benjamin’s Path of No Return”, Ground Up (Delineations) 5 (2016): 70–75.
[10] In the current epoch that Paul Crutzen famously labelled the Anthropocene, human activity is permanently recorded in the geological record. Paul J. Crutzen, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, in Eckart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (eds.), Earth System Science in the Anthropocene (Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer 2006), 13–18.
[11] Here I draw on Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
[12] Here I draw on Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 4–31. Bruno Latour, ‘A Cautious Prometheus?’ Keynote lecture for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, 3 September 2008.
[13] The public landscape is not limited to the bucolic countryside or the protected wilderness. Today it also includes the burgeoning urban landscape: the streets, the parks, the appropriated interstitial spaces, the postindustrial wastelands, the cultural precincts, and even the external surfaces of buildings.
[14] The archaic verb dispark means to ‘divest a park of its private use’ by ‘throw[ing] parkland open.’ Charles Talbut Onions (ed.), The Shorter English Dictionary on Historical Principals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 530.
[15] This is a reference to the Mauer im Kopf (the wall in the head), that persists in the psycho-geographies of Berliners long after the fall of the concrete Berlin Wall.
[16] This is a reference to the spontaneous airport demonstrations that followed the Trump administration’s January 2017 Muslim travel ban.
[18] See Karl Kullmann, ‘Thin Parks / Thick Edges: Towards a Linear Park Typology for (Post)infrastructural Sites’, Journal of Landscape Architecture 6/2 (2011): 70–81.
[19] For in depth explorations of the Mexico/US borderlands, see Michael Dear, ‘Imagining a Third Nation: US-Mexico Border’, Ground Up (Delineations) 5 (2016): 46–55.
[20] For a distinctly theological perspective on the California border in relationship to California citizenship, see Jason S. Sexton, ‘Borders and Barriers: Citizenship in California’, in Kirsteen Kim and Alexia Salvatierra (eds.), Los Angeles as a Global Crossroads: Migration, Transnationalism, and Faith (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022), 131–150.
[21] The return of border walls has revived some decidedly medieval devices for their circumvention in the form of ladders, catapults and tunnels.
[22] On the cultural impact of the whole earth image, see Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London: I.B. Taurus, 2008), chapter 1.
[23] As defined by The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
[24] See James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986).
[25] See Karl Kullmann, ‘The Usefulness of Uselessness: Towards a Landscape Framework for Un-activated Urban Public Space’, Architectural Theory Review 19/2 (2015): 154–173.
[26] As classified by the World Wide Fund for Nature, bioregions are ecologically and geographically distinct areas.
Karl Kullmann is a landscape architect, urban designer, and Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, University of California, Berkeley.
[E-0026-013-39], San Antonio Express-News Photograph Collection, MS 360, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections
On August 28, 1970, a group of constituents penned a letter to Chester Holifield, California’s 19th District Congress member.[1] Comprised primarily of women, the authors asserted that welfare recipients in their suburban communities constitute a “burden on the taxpayer and the homeowner.” Decades of conservative angst over the New Deal state birthed nativism throughout suburban Los Angeles. “Aliens of any country should not be allowed in our country if they have no means of support,” they argued before asking rhetorically, “have you seen the cars these people drive?” And, in a move that became so emblematic of Ronald Reagan’s brand of conservatism, the authors pathologized women who depended on government assistance in arguing that “unwed mothers, divorcees, dope addicts…and aliens” deserved no public benefits.[2] This was not George Wallace’s Alabama; it was Reagan’s California. Latinx population increases in those suburbs, and others like them across the state, fueled local populist anxieties that nested in state and national Republican Party platforms. Spanish surnames like Andrade, Ochoa, and Saldivar,to name just a few, scrawled across the final page revealed an unsettling truth about the suburbs east of East Los Angeles; an emerging Hispanic conservative base had found its voice.
In The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump, Geraldo Cadava explains the origins of the GOP’s Hispanic constituency (Hispanic is the preferred identifier for most in this group). Hispanic support of the Republican Party has calcified over the last five decades and yielded considerable support for Donald J. Trump’s GOP despite its bombastic rhetoric and lethal policies. Since the early 1970s, Hispanic conservatives have influenced elections by siphoning off votes from Democrats and pointing a new direction in American racial politics. Even when the GOP loses, as in the 2020 presidential election where Trump lost to Democratic challenger Joseph R. Biden by a considerable margin, Hispanic support for the GOP remains steady. Polls show that Trump actually gained in Hispanic voter support from 2016 to 2020 — a concerning statistic for many. Indeed, Cadava argues that a principal objective of his book is to historicize and contextualize Hispanic support for Republicans, including Trump (336). Why there are Republican Hispanics is not so much the driving question, as that would presume a political authenticity that is not true of any group. As Cadava asserts, “Latinos aren’t naturally liberal or conservative. They aren’t naturally anything” (xvii). Rather, Cadava explores how Hispanic Republicans crafted collective identities within the conservative movement and to what extent they wielded real institutional power.
New York: ECCO an imprint of Harper Collins, 2020
Argued over ten chapters and divided into four sections, “Awakening,” Influence,” “Doubt,” and “Loyalty,” Cadava’s book is a sweeping survey of the leaders, organizations, and shifts that make up the Hispanic Republican leadership and the opening to an increasingly urgent conversation about the intertwined futures of Latinx politics and the evolution of the GOP. As Cadava writes, partisan issues such as border-wall funding, taxes and business regulations are a result of an electorates’ set of concerns in a given place and time. However, a significant contribution that he makes here is to extend “issues” into the past in order to expose the ideological foundations upon which they rest. More than any single problem, Hispanics have become loyal Republicans over the last seven decades based on a web of dogmas about U.S.-Latin American relations; the United States’ role in spreading democracy around the globe; government-supported capitalism; and a “contrarian identity politics that is every bit as pronounced as the liberal identity politics they’ve spent decades criticizing.” (xvi).
The first wave of Hispanic Republicans formed their political identities through the crucible of the Cold War in Latin America and its manifestations within the territorial boundaries of the continental United States. Prior to the 1950s, Hispanic partisanship vacillated between both major parties, but Cadava argues that World War II and national political realignment following Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency shaped Hispanic politics just as it did for other Americans. Cuban American exiles like Desi Arnaz of I Love Lucy fame, and Mexican American business leaders like Lionel Sosa, a graduate of Sidney Lanier High School in San Antonio’s West Side barrio, embraced the party’s tough stance against communism, its position on law and order on the domestic front, and its business-friendly policymaking laced with rhetoric of self-determination. For Cadava, Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential bid in 1952 proved a testing ground for the GOP’s appeal to Hispanic voters. The 1952 “Latinos con Eisenhower” campaign and its successor “Me Gusta Ike” in 1956 promoted Eisenhower’s Cold Warrior credentials and beckoned supporters who felt like the Democratic Party took Latinos for granted. Disaffected Latino Democrats proved a source of recruitment for Republicans during the Eisenhower years. John Flores and Manuel Mesa, both from California, created the institutional frameworks to recruit Hispanics to the Republican camp by tapping into the same disillusionment that spurred leftist community organizers both in the cities and in the fields. The Republican Party adopted a militant anti-communist platform and won Hispanic support, particularly from those with roots in regions touched by revolution, CIA-backed coup d’états, and draconian immigration enforcement policies.
In anti-communism Republicans readied the assault on domestic labor organizing and civil rights efforts. The 1950 deportation of renowned labor organizer and civil rights activist Luisa Moreno is testament to the emergence of Cold War maneuvers on the domestic front. However, rather than oppose such actions, Hispanic Republicans became more defiant in their racial politics. Democratic Party leadership, at least rhetorically, had taken up the mantle for civil rights. By contrast, conservatives such as Barry Goldwater innovated new modalities of anti-blackness by hanging their arguments for segregation on outcomes of the free market.
Barry Goldwater’s conservatism and anti-communism shifted the Republican Party further to the right. The racist ideologies underlying his platforms attracted like-minded blue-collar voters across the country, which included Hispanics who identified more with Anglo Americans than with non-whites. Perhaps because Hispanic Republican numbers were few in the early 1960s, they showed surprising unity despite regional and national-origin differences.
Cadava highlights the role that California Republican candidates played in pushing the party to recognize the Hispanic electorate. Richard Nixon grew the Hispanic Republican base because of his personal history in suburban southern California and because he recognized early on that Hispanics, particularly Mexican Americans, could potentially put Republicans over the top.
In the third chapter, “Nixon’s Hispanics,” Cadava recounts the stories of several influential Hispanic businesspeople. Romana Acosta Bañuelos, who immigrated from Chihuahua, Mexico, rose to success at the head of Ramona’s Mexican Food Products in Los Angeles, and became chairwoman of the Pan American National Bank located on First Street in East Los Angeles. Nixon selected Bañuelos to head the Treasury based on her hard scrabble background and the symbolism it offered for free market capitalism and rugged individualism. He also approved of the fact that she did not participate in the Chicano Movement, despite the décor of her bank adorned with imagery of Aztec civilization – a ubiquitous iconography of the movement (95-7). Even though many Chicanos considered Bañuelos a “tia taco,” or “vendida,” (Chicanx slang for sell-out) she would emerge as one of Nixon’s greatest ambassadors for courting Hispanics. Whether or not she truly represented a “token,” as her detractors argued, she wielded actual power and influence as the Treasurer of the United States appointed by a Republican president. Democrats had never come close to incorporating Latinos – let alone Latinas! – into serious positions of authority, despite the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson whose popularity with Latinos far surpassed that of any Republican politician then or since. This fact was not lost on the community-at-large, nor on the Nixon surrogates who helped to orchestrate the nomination. Influence and visibility counted for a lot and Democrats lost the race in that respect.
[E-0022-067-27], San Antonio Express-News Photograph Collection, MS 360, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections
Bañuelos’s rise to prominence in the Nixon White House resulted from a strategy to attract Hispanics in greater numbers to the party’s orbit. However, an immigration raid on Bañuelos’s business in East Los Angeles in 1971 cast a pall around her nomination for Secretary of the Treasury because public opinion about undocumented immigrant workers circulated widely through the California press. Calls for employer sanctions on those businesses that knowingly employed undocumented labor culminated in the Dixon Arnett bill that Gov. Reagan signed into law a mere one month following the Bañuelos raid.[3]
Nixon’s efforts to install Hispanics in government positions, regardless of their efficacy as politicos or of their community acceptance, helped to solidify a Hispanic base for the party well into the future. Even the dirty tricks embodied by the Watergate affair strangely shored up Cuban American support, particularly in Miami as 4 of the 5 men held close association with Cuba either through ancestry, anticommunism, or both. The effort to bug the Democratic Party offices in the complex was prompted by Nixon surrogates’ assertions that the Castro regime secretly funneled large sums of money to the George McGovern campaign. Thus, spying on Democrats was justified in the eyes of many everyday Cuban Americans whose disdain for Castro and communism ran deep. Many, in fact, wondered why the arrested “plumbers” were considered criminal at all given the Cold War context of the narrative. Under the Trump Administration, they might have been elevated to the level of national heroes and fully pardoned by the president. It was an ignominious contribution, but Cuban American participation in the Watergate break signified one of the most consequential events in modern Republican Party politics. Cadava shows that despite Nixon’s culpability, perhaps even because of it, Hispanic support of the GOP did not waiver. Rather than repel Cubanos, the event did the opposite by burnishing the Cold Warrior credentials of the GOP standard bearer. Also, by that time, an infrastructure had been built to expand Hispanic influence in the party. The Republican National Hispanic Assembly (RNHA) had emerged as force within the party and thus launched the efforts by members to reach further into the apparatus.
Cadava writes about the latter half of the 1970s as a period of doubt marked by a decline in Hispanic support that was triggered by uninspired leadership, the loss of the Vietnam War, a global recession, and increased undocumented immigration. Nixon’s downfall caused ripples across the rest of the Hispanic Republican world. Where Cuban Americans found a bedrock of anti-communist support in the party, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in different parts of the United States waivered in their enthusiasm for the party’s direction.
[E-0022-067-39], San Antonio Express-News Photograph Collection, MS 360, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections
Into this void stepped Benjamin Fernandez, a Mid-Western born Mexican American with dreams of uniting all Hispanics under the GOP banner. As quixotic as any Hispanic Republican leader before or since, “Boxcar Ben” – as he was known because of his self-styled narrative about his birth in a railroad boxcar in Kansas City, Missouri – mattered because he was able to situate himself against the measures of his time: the Chicano Movement, immigration liberalization, and the government social safety net. The son of migrant workers from Michoacán who traversed the Midwestern states before settling in East Chicago, Indiana, Fernandez pulled hard on the bootstraps mythology that he believed colored his story. A lifelong Republican, he set out to become the first Hispanic president of the United States running in the 1980 primaries against the likes of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and John Connally. Although he did not win even 1 percent of the national electoral vote, Cadava rescues this character from the historical shadows to demonstrate that the new militancy birthed by the Chicano Movement coincided with a smaller, but equally persistent, movement within conservative circles to tap into the working-class and family-oriented sensibilities of many Hispanics just as blue-collar whites began to leave the Democratic Party en masse.
Reagan reenergized the Hispanic constituency by reviving the Cold War, particularly in the face of retrenchment with Cuba. Additionally, he played his popularity as governor of California and the battles he waged against civil rights, to the Hispanics who supported him in his home state. Reagan’s landslide victory in November 1980 not only burst Ben Fernandez’s bubble, but also consolidated conservative politics at the national level. Reagan’s tough stance against Fidel Castro inspired Cuban Americans to support the newly elected president. Jorge Mas Canosa, a Miami-based Cuban American politico, helped to form the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) modeled on American Israel Political Affairs Committee and laid the foundation for a reliable GOP constituency in South Florida that persists today. Reagan further garnered Hispanic support by usurping the immigration bill that existed in many draft forms since the early 70s (it lived for a time as the Carter Bill) to sign the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. IRCA endeared Reagan to Hispanics because it opened a path for amnesty at the same time that it codified employer sanctions and drew limits around further legal immigration. It proved a Pyrrhic victory for the GOP as it would also throw fuel onto the kindling of nativism that had begun to emerge within party ranks as early as the 1970s.
The populist uprising within the party around Puerto Rican statehood and undocumented Latino immigration tested the loyalty of many Hispanic Republicans. Despite Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s victory in a Florida special congressional election in 1988 which signaled a significant victory for Cuban American Republicans, the national appeal of the party faced jeopardy because of the swell in thinly veiled white nationalist rhetoric and policy priorities.
Cadava shines a spotlight on George H.W. Bush’s influence on Hispanic Republicans. With a naturalized Mexican American daughter-in-law and mixed-race grandchildren whom, H.W. notoriously referred to as Jebby’s “little brown ones” on the campaign trail in 1988, H.W. inspired hope as a moderating force within the GOP to continue to rally Hispanic voters. His victory in 1988 yielded strong support initially. He oversaw the confirmations of three prominent Hispanics to his administration, Lauro Cavazos as Education Secretary, Manuel Luján, Jr. as Secretary of the Interior, and Catalina Vásquez Villalpondo as Treasurer. He also flexed support for Puerto Rican Statehood and appeared to Cuban Americans as a battle-tested Cold Warrior by virtue of his eight-year tenure as Vice President under Reagan. However, not long into his term, he began to lose support as statehood died in Congress at the hands of fiscal conservatives in both parties. Also, the end of the Soviet Union and normalization of U.S.-Russia relations essentially removed Cuba from the foreign affairs priority list as national security concerns shifted from communism to terrorism and flipped the map from Latin America to the Middle East. Notably, the Department of Justice opened an investigation into Villalpondo’s activities in the Treasury Department where she faced accusations of improperly influencing the delegation of non-competitive contracts to her former employer. She was eventually convicted of tax evasion and destruction of evidence.
Pat Buchanan’s insertion into the debates around Puerto Rican statehood inflamed tensions between Hispanics in the Republican Party and their non-Hispanic fellows. Buchanan launched a tirade in the Washington Times early in 1990 that played overtly to strains of white ethnonationalism already strong in the GOP. He claimed that 50 percent of Puerto Ricans qualified for welfare and therefore posed a significant financial burden to the United States. Buchanan further asserted that including 6 million Spanish speakers would mark the end of the English-only United States and argued that the new proposed state would send six new Democratic house members and two new liberal senators to Washington (284-5). Prominent Hispanic Republican Luis A. Ferré responded vigorously, speaking for the collective outraged Puerto Rican community that Buchanan’s racist arguments were unfounded, and that the 51st state would contribute to the nation in taxes and military sacrifice, and that the language argument held no merit because 15 million Spanish speakers already called the U.S. home. He also wrote that although nobody on the island in 1898 asked to become a colony of the U.S., Puerto Ricans remained “loyal Americans” (286). Buchanan’s position ultimately won the day and marked a significant pivot from a longstanding GOP policy priority. On a more expanded level, it signaled the growing power of xenophobic discourse and white grievance politics as weapons against people of color and center-left and progressive advocates.
The would-be rupture between Hispanic Republicans and the party, although strained, failed to materialize even as Pat Buchanan blustered on a national stage. In California, former San Diego mayor and U.S. Senator Pete Wilson pushed the GOP immigration agenda further to the right as governor of the Golden State from 1991 to 1999. This creep in party discourse began during the Reagan years as the agendas in 1984 and 1988 insisted that the U.S. retained an “absolute right” to secure its borders by legislation, police enforcement, and even physical barriers. Cadava writes that Hispanic Republicans found themselves betwixt and between a party that grew in hostility towards people who looked like them and their compatriots who would be potential Republicans if the party toned down its rhetoric. One example Cadava offers that exposes the choppy waters Hispanic Republicans navigated came in 1992 during the GOP national convention agenda which called for the erection of “structures” along the southern border. Rather than recognize the most common definition of that term, i.e. physical barriers, many surrogates, including Hispanics, described the phrasing as metaphorical (295-296).
Debates over fencing in the 1990s became a proxy for white nationalist, nativist, and anti-Latino sentiment. Far from an easily cordoned off set of camps, many Hispanics supported fencing and immigration restriction, and many non-Latinos opposed the same measures. Bill Clinton’s immigration agenda included some of the most militaristic efforts in decades, beginning with Operation Hold the Line in El Paso and followed by Operation Gatekeeper in California and Operation Safeguard in Arizona. So as the GOP drifted further into the nativist cesspool, Democrats followed as the Clinton White House established policy prescriptions that would prove even deadlier for migrants seeking to cross into the U.S.
This is perhaps the greatest strength of the book in that it demonstrates that an agenda built on fiscal austerity and small government was not the overriding raison d’etre for Republicans despite their claims to the contrary. Rather, demographic change, nativism, and racism were equally powerful drivers, if not more so, in shaping the modern Republican agenda. As one of the founders of the Save Our State initiative in California, better remembered as Proposition 187, recalled as she walked into a social services center in 1991 “with babies and little children all over the place,” speaking Spanish, she learned that they qualified for the same benefits as U.S. citizens and then and there transformed from a “political neophyte to a fiery crusader” (301-2). Such populist energy against demographic change fueled Governor Pete Wilson’s re-election platform in 1994. Running on anti-immigrant sentiment and championing Prop. 187 made Wilson a GOP darling for those on the far right such as Rush Limbaugh, at the time a burgeoning radio personality.
Cadava highlights the 1990s as a watershed for immigration legislative debate. The far-right agenda focusing on restriction and removal became the center of the GOP, and likewise influenced Democratic positions (310). Support of anti-immigrant measures at the state and federal levels hurt the GOP and shook the faith of its longtime Hispanic supporters. As a presidential candidate, Bob Dole did not commit to cultivating Hispanic support for his candidacy, not out of any special enmity, but more likely because he was a rather terrible candidate. His poor showings in California and in Florida,where he was the first Republican candidate to lose the state since 1968, signaled to the national party that Hispanic support was slipping. Combining a bad candidate with bad politics sunk the national party in that decade. Additionally, the renewed nativism on the right prompted a groundswell of naturalization and permanent residency applications by Latinos in direct response. As Cadava notes, this was likely not a result of newfound patriotism for the U.S., but a pragmatic decision to protect themselves and their families from deportation or loss of benefits (311).
For Cuban Americans in Miami, the Elián González case confirmed their conservative partisanship. The Democratic Party’s adherence to Bill Clinton’s “wet foot, dry foot” policy for Cubans crossing into the United States sunk Al Gore’s chances in the state as Hispanics in Florida rallying around González punished him at the polls in favor of his Republican challenger, George W. Bush (321-2). Détente between nativist forces and compassionate conservatives was made possible by the Bush family’s influence and popularity with Hispanics. But the floodgates were blitzed and the peace lasted only as long as the PATRIOT Act and the unsupported popular perception that the southern border offered viable passage for would be terrorists.
Fifty years following the Holifield letter that opened this review, the city council in Whittier, California added a new member, Jessica Martinez, whose political identity aligns with the insurgency championed by Donald Trump. Social media posts that predated her election caused an outrage for what some viewed as their bald racism and bigotry. However, the mark of her trumpista GOP identity was confirmed on January 6, 2021 as she attended the “Stop the Steal” rally promoted by Trump and his boot lickers in an effort to overturn the 2020 Presidential Election results which Joe Biden won by more than 7 million popular votes. Although Martinez contends that she would not have gone to Washington, D.C. if she had known violence would rock the Capitol, she remains unrepentant in her political beliefs, despite narrowly escaping formal censure.[4] More well-known is Miami-born Enrique Tarrio, the Afro-Cuban leader of the fascist organization Proud Boys who have become an informal political army for Trump. Tarrio spent the day prior to the insurrection in a jail cell as law enforcement personnel arrested him upon arrival to D.C. for his role in burning a Black Lives Matter flag during a protest the previous month.[5] So what are we to make of these Hispanics, past and present, who continue their allegiance to a party that has long since proven to harbor anti-Latino agendas?
For all the answers that Cadava provides in this text, we are left to speculate how self-identified Hispanics like Martinez and Tarrio became contributors to the latest white supremacist surge. Here it is important to remember what George Lipsitz taught us about the power of whiteness as an identity that structures opportunities, benefits, and, as we consistently see, protection from accountability: “even nonwhite people can become active agents of white supremacy as well as passive participants in its hierarchies and rewards.”[6] As a condition predicated more on power than prejudice or pigment, whiteness “manifests itself through practices that create differential access to wealth, health, housing, education, jobs, and justice.”[7] Historically, people of color who have touted conservative populist causes have done so by aligning with taxpayers or homeowners groups concerned about declining property values. In our present day, the fascist rearticulation of the term “patriot” enables people like Martinez and Tarrio to nuzzle up to whiteness so long as they express outrage at undocumented immigration, or any immigration for that matter, denounce Black Lives Matter, and support a whole host of lies.
Similar to the internal struggles in the 1960s and 1970s, brown participants in the GOP do not go unchallenged. As the Latinos Por Trump group ramped up efforts, Latinx opponents refashioned the epithets from an earlier generation that charged these actors as sell outs to their people. A popular insult – “tiene el nopal en la frente” – highlights the hypocrisy of being Latina/o/x and supporting white American conservative causes, particularly those that target Latino immigrants. Literally translated as “you have the cactus on your forehead”, the point it makes is that brown/indigenous/mestizo physical features belie the support of white supremacy.
It is in these grittier social contexts that readers will ask more from this text than it delivers. It is not a social history of Hispanic Republicans, nor does Cadava frame it in such terms. Rather than a focus on everyday Hispanic conservatives, the focus is fixed primarily on the institutions that created access for Hispanics into the party, and the principal actors in this historical drama. Many will want an explanation for folks like Tarrio, Martinez from the Whittier City Council, and the signatories of the Holifield letter, but, for now, will have to analyze them and other grassroots conservatives through the prism of this institutional history.
Perhaps a more peculiar absence in this book is an analysis of the Ayn Rand-style libertarian influence on the current GOP. The “greed is good” strain of conservative thought has arguably been as influential in the evolution of the post-Reagan machine as blue-collar conservatism and racism. How do Hispanic Republicans figure into the libertarian wing of the party? Certainly Ted Cruz, a renowned Rand acolyte and self-styled libertarian, enjoys a significant following of Hispanic voters (35% support in the 2018 Texas senate race versus Beto O’Rourke). The extent to which Hispanics subscribe to GOP-informed libertarianism is an open question and one that merits further research to understand how future pathways to whiteness channel through such conservative ideals.
Another condition of the modern GOP that is curiously absent in Cadava’s book is a focused analysis on space and how it contoured conservative politics at the metropolitan level. As Juan De Lara points out in Inland Shift (2018) places like Inland Southern California from 1978 to the 2000s supplanted the coastal regions as conservative bastions with large numbers of Republican Party voters and representatives. Indeed, as demonstrated in Adam Goodman’s essay in East of East (2020) and in his monograph, The Deportation Machine (2020), suburban municipalities like South El Monte, California became new nativist fronts marked by Immigration and Naturalization Service raids and support for anti-immigrant legislation like Proposition 187 in 1994. Such efforts have steadily come to dominate the national Republican Party immigration agenda, but all began at local levels. Trump’s immigration czar, Stephen Miller, grew up in Santa Monica and came up through the ranks of southern California’s nativist machine, first by consuming conservative radio that in the 1980s included characters like Wally George and in the 1990s were dominated by figures like Rush Limbaugh, and Larry Elder, and then by making a name as an undergraduate provocateur at Duke University. The political positions he developed in Southern California eventually came to define the Trump Administration’s immigration agenda.
I highlight the absences because, as a study with ambitions to forge new lines of inquiry within Latinx Studies, it is highly successful and will undoubtedly launch new and sorely needed research projects that deepen our understanding of the diverse political identities of this growing population. Traditional studies of Latinx politics focused on organizations and institutions to broaden access to the grassroots-level research on organizers and activists. Cadava has paved the way for such future studies by contextualizing the key organs of Hispanic power within the GOP. For one, the Republican National Hispanic Assembly receives considerable attention throughout the text for its role in shaping a constituency within the GOP. Founded in the late 1960s as the Republican National Hispanic Council by a group of war veterans and professionals, the organization would grow to wield significant influence. This vehicle for Hispanic participation embedded in the GOP network symbolized the party’s official recognition of “the little brown ones” in their midst – to borrow from George H.W. Bush’s lexicon – and opened pathways for future recruitment.
Additionally, Cadava highlights the gendered experiences of Hispanic women leaders who played fundamental roles both in the GOP apparatus and national politics. For example, Romana Acosta Bañuelos, Katherine Ortega, and Catalina Vasquez Villalpando, all Hispanic women, all Treasurers of the United States under Republican presidents, represent more than “tokens” but actual power brokers. The fact that Richard Nixon appointed a fellow Californian, Bañuelos, a Mexican American banker from East Los Angeles, meant that a Hispanic Republican and woman of color exercised actual authority over federal decisions. Cadava demonstrates that the GOP has implemented strategic efforts to challenge the idea that their political agenda is racist and sexist by promoting women and people of color for national and state leadership.
The Hispanic Republican is a wake-up call for progressives, particularly white liberals, who uncritically believe that rising Latinx population numbers will naturally shift the political winds. We learn a lot about the machinations of Hispanic Republican power, how it is cultivated and seated, and why any liberal dreams of it evaporating are pure fantasy, given how embedded it is in the GOP apparatus. There is nothing irrational in many Hispanics’ embrace of conservative causes and policies. Rather, the historical resonances with one-third of the messy conglomeration of peoples lumped into the category challenges us to think critically about the value they find in Republican Party platforms and promises.
One of the real gems of this book is how Cadava rescues monumental figures from the throwaway lines and endnote catacombs of so many Latino political histories prior. Bañuelos, for example, receives a full treatment, as does “Boxcar” Ben. Regardless of their brand of politics, they are significant figures in the grand tapestry of Latinx history and deserve to be adequately critiqued in the context of their counterparts. For example, Bañuelos faced protests by the United Farm Workers and Chicana/o activists as a result of her hiring practices and for her loyalty to Nixon. These kinds of internal politics warrant closer examination and introspection for Chicanx scholars who seek to understand the ripple effect of the 1970s on our current politics. In the end, we learn that Hispanic Republicans are dogmatic about the principles that govern the GOP. Anti-communism paved the way for hostility towards any political philosophy left of center. Goldwater’s color-blind racism became the seed bed for a refashioned white supremacy, and the hero-worship that Nixon once enjoyed, and that Reagan still holds, created a condition that allows for a single person to shape the party agenda. In other words, Hispanic Republicans are just like the majority of Republicans, and they will not be so easily dislodged from the party apparatus.
Notes
[1] This letter is dated one day prior to the Chicano Moratorium that overtook Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles and infamously culminated in widespread abuse by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies and the murder of Los Angeles Times columnist Rubén Salazar.
[2] Betty Lounsberry, et. al. to Holifield, 28 August 1970, Chester Holifield Papers, box 22, folder “Welfare Programs 1970,” Department of Special Collections, University of Southern California.
[3] For more about the political climate surrounding undocumented immigration in California see Jimmy Patiño, ¡Raza Si! ¡Migra No!: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego (Chapel Hill: University of North Carlina Press, 2017, 104. The California Supreme Court eventually ruled the Dixon Arnett legislation unconstitutional.
[6] George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Twentieth Anniversary ed., (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, viii.
Jerry González is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Director of the UTSA Mexico Center, and Principal Investigator on the UTSA Mellon Humanities Pathways Grant. His research interests in Latinx metropolitan history and identity, transnational and transregional migrations, and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands inform the courses he teaches in history and American Studies. Prior to arriving at UTSA he spent 2009-2010 as a Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Latina/Latino Studies Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he began work on his book, In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills: Latino Suburbanization in Postwar Los Angeles published in 2018 by Rutgers University Press in the Series “Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States.” His current research on San Antonio as a site of continuous Latin American migrations explores the intersection of Sunbelt and Borderlands political economies, cultural confluence, and grassroots organizing.
Historical studies of American slavery have focused most intensely on events that took place in the southeastern part of the United States, and on the social, economic, and political developments that surrounded it there. In West of Slavery, Kevin Waite demonstrates that slavery was in the process of expanding in the southwestern part of the country before the Civil War began, and that efforts to establish what he calls the “Continental South” grew in strength and intensity as the conflict continued. If those efforts had been successful, he argues, slavery would have extended across the southern part of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and even into foreign lands. Waite’s statement that “slaveholders lusted after a transpacific dominion” is vividly supported by this book.
Waite’s definition of the “Continental South” includes California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Utah. Although plantation slavery never took root there, he demonstrates that other forms of coercive labor received strong legal protection there and, for a time, flourished. During the Civil War, supporters of this labor threatened to bring the region into the conflict, encouraging the Confederate rebellion and promising the creation of a continent–wide nation devoted to the perpetuation of slavery and other forms of oppressive labor. West of Slavery’s purpose is to show how this proslavery influence began, continued, and was ultimately crushed.
White southerners transported an estimated 500-1,500 enslaved African Americans into gold rush California. Here, an interracial party mines for gold in Spanish Flat, El Dorado County, in 1852. Although the status of these black men is unknown, they were likely enslaved, as El Dorado County had one of the highest concentrations of slaveholders in the state at this time. Joseph Blaney Starkweather, Spanish Flat, 1852, California History room, California State Library, Sacramento.
Much of Waite’s book is devoted to the rise of pro–Southern and pro–slavery influence in Southern California, where Democrats under the leadership of California’s U.S. Senator William M. Gwin held sway during the 1850s. (Gwin actually owned about two-hundred slaves in Mississippi, although he did not bring them to California.) Southerners from the southeastern United States, motivated first by John C. Calhoun, who died in March 1850, later by a prominent plantation owner and railroad promoter named James Gadsden, and then by Jefferson Davis, who served as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce, supported Gwin and his efforts to bring a southern railroad from the west banks of the Mississippi to San Diego and to permit plantation owners to establish slave colonies in Southern California. These efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, but not for want of trying.
The story of the slaveholders’ efforts to bring a southern railroad to California is compelling. All westerners hoped for a railway that would cross the plains, valleys, deserts, and mountains that separated the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean. But there were different hopes for where it should be built. Some wanted it in the north, some argued that it should be built across the center of the country, and yet others in the extreme south. The southerners supported the southern route, of course, but acquiesced in a survey that would determine where the best route would be. While waiting for decisions to be made, and facing the critical question of whether the federal government should lend its financial support to the construction of the railroad, southerners supported a wagon road, first called the Overland Mail Road, later the Butterfield Overland Mail Road (John Butterfield was the man who actually ran the company that operated the road), and, after Butterfield fell into financial distress, the Wells Fargo Overland Mail. Although many Southern political leaders asserted constitutional arguments against any federal financial assistance to the proposed railroad, they were happy to support the Overland Mail road, which at considerable federal expense carried mail as well as west–bound travelers, some of whom were looking for places where they could establish colonies replete with slave laborers. When Davis learned that the southern railroad route was faced with looming mountain obstacles, he urged Pierce to send Gadsden to Mexico to purchase additional land through which the railroad could pass south of the mountains. This effort resulted in what is now known as the Gadsden Purchase. The Overland Mail was rendered unprofitable by the short–lived Pony Express, which in 1860 crossed the middle of the country, and by the development of rail routes across Panama and Nicaragua, before the last link in the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. Waite’s account of how all of this happened, and how Southern efforts to build what they affectionately called the “great slavery road,” ultimately failed, is long and detailed. His scholarship raises the story to a new level.
A crowd gathers as a Butterfield stagecoach prepares to depart from San Francisco. The San Francisco Bulletin called the Overland Mail “the most popular institution of the Far West.” Harper’s Weekly, December 11, 1858.
West of Slavery plunges deep into the Civil War history of New Mexico and Arizona and the efforts of slavery supporters to extend their empires into those territories. Political struggles were matched by military conflicts that for a time gave hope to the Southerners that they would prevail. Jefferson Davis authorized two military officers, Colonel John R. Baylor and Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley, to invade New Mexico from Texas and, after they did so, they achieved some notable victories, capturing Mesilla, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, then going on to Tucson. Ultimately, however, they did not prevail, due in large part to anti–slavery forces that moved eastward from California to meet them. U.S. Army Colonel James Henry Carleton’s 2,000–man “California Column” left Camp Drum on the Southern California coast in the spring of 1862, passed through Yuma, went on to capture Tucson, then proceeded along the Rio Grande to Santa Fe, ultimately forcing the Confederates to retreat back into Texas. Waite’s description of these events is detailed and compelling.
The US military installation at Drum Barracks, Wilmington, California, circa 1865. Note the camel in the foreground, a Unionist repurposing of Jefferson Davis’s antebellum pet project. USC Digital Library, California Historical Society Collection, Los Angeles.
Waite includes informative descriptions and analyses of events that took place in his “Continental South” as the war drew to a close, then proceeded into the post–war era of Reconstruction. African Americans did not fare well in these events, nor did the Asian Americans and the Native Americans who were faced with an almost unending chain of bitter opposition. This part of West of Slavery effectively extends the bigger story of the efforts of the slave powers to extend their empire across North America and, after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, to perpetuate all that they could of that empire.
The book includes a study of efforts to remember the pro–slavery “Continental South” through the formation of organizations that celebrated slavery, that built monuments to Confederate heroes, and that sought to honor those heroes by applying their names to mountains, valleys, roads, and soaring trees––all in the land that the Confederates had hoped to build a great slavery empire in. Through these efforts, they sought to perpetuate the memory of what Waite calls “the presence of the Old South in the Far West.”
A granite pillar in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, honoring some thirty Confederate veterans buried in the surrounding plot. Erected in 1925, this was the first major Confederate memorial in the Far West. It was removed in August 2017, following the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph by the author.
Kevin Waite is not only a determined scholar. He is also a wonderful writer. Those who are impatient to quickly arrive at the conclusion of his story must be patient, however. The book is filled with detailed discoveries. Sometimes it can be tiring to reach the end of a story, but the end rewards the reader’s patience.
One slight objection is the title of Waite’s book. When first read, West of Slavery suggests that the book is about a part of the West that is beyond slavery. It is not, of course. It is a land in which forced labor was strong and rampant, in which the hopes of spreading slavery and the efforts to do so were vigorous and determined, and in which the failure of those efforts was far from inevitable. If the title had been The West of Slavery, it might have been clearer. Waite himself hints at this, writing that the “preposition in this book’s title is possessive. In other words, the Far Southwest was a land of slavery and slaveholding influence; it was not free from it.” This objection is, however, not only slight––it is very slight.
Brian McGinty (BA, American History, JD, School of Law, University of California, Berkeley) is the author of twelve books and 200 articles that have appeared in popular magazines and scholarly journals. His Lincoln’s Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America (Liveright/W.W. Norton 2015) and Lincoln and the Court (Harvard University Press 2008) discuss important chapters in the life of Abraham Lincoln. His Archy Lee’s Struggle for Freedom: The True Story of California Gold, the Nation’s Tragic March toward Civil War, and a Young Black Man’s Fight for Liberty (Lyons Press/Rowman & Littlefield 2019) and The Rest I will Kill: William Tillman and the Unforgettable Story of How a Free Black Man Refused to Become a Slave (Liveright/W.W. Norton 2016) describe important chapters in the struggle of African Americans to escape slavery and win freedom both before and after the Civil War. His John Brown’s Trial (Harvard University Press 2009) describes the sensational judicial proceeding that made the abolitionist John Brown one of the most famous (and controversial) martyrs in American history. See more of Brian’s work at http://brianmcgintyauthor.com/
Reaganland is the final installment of Rick Perlstein’s critically acclaimed history of the modern conservative movement. Beginning with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, continuing through the Nixon years, and culminating with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory, the four-volume saga furnishes an enormous amount of period detail culled from a wide variety of sources. Focused mostly on electoral politics, it chronicles the period’s key campaigns, surveys the social movements that shaped the political landscape, and encapsulates countless contemporary issues. Perlstein’s commentary is sparing but refreshingly tart. Although he elsewhere describes himself as a European-style social democrat, he clearly admires the conservative movement’s passion and resolve, and he is especially tough on liberal pundits and operatives who dismissed or underestimated their adversaries. For these and other reasons, Perlstein’s magnum opus is the most comprehensive introduction to the Age of Reagan.
In my review of the third volume, I noted that Perlstein’s style was exhausting but not quite exhaustive. That pattern is even more evident in Reaganland. Unlike its predecessors, it does not use an explicit theme or organizing device to shape and direct the story. Moreover, it violates a basic narrative convention by steadily expanding the size of the cast. On almost every page of this lengthy book, Perlstein introduces several new characters, many of whom appear only once. As a result, the final volume sprawls more than an Orange County suburb. Perlstein marches through the major events, issues, and news items of the Carter presidency: Panama Canal, OPEC, Iran, SALT II, Moral Majority, Three Mile Island, Afghanistan, tax revolt, affirmative action, supply-side economics, and so on. He also details the shifting rivalries and alliances, both major and minor, within and between the two parties. Although his determination to map every twist in the road is impressive, the steady accumulation of detail does not always lead to a deeper understanding of the period or its major figures. Indeed, I often felt that I was reliving, rather than reassessing, a four-year period that was not especially enjoyable the first time around. Even as the curtain falls on his lengthy series, Perlstein draws no conclusions about the movement he has chronicled. Instead, he quotes Reagan’s inaugural speech (“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem …”) and adds that the fur coats at the inaugural balls “so overloaded the coatracks that they resembled great lumbering mastodons out of the prehistoric past.” It is a nice touch but not a helpful summation of a lengthy, complicated narrative.
Something else is missing as well. Having read the entire cycle, I now believe it is related to the story’s provenance. Thousands of minor characters come and go in Perlstein’s epic, but its chief protagonists emerged from a relatively small region— Southern California and Arizona—which had exercised little political influence at the national level. Perlstein documents the rising power of the Sun Belt, but one can read this entire series without learning why Southern California produced the two most important American politicians in the second half of the twentieth century. When posed directly, that question calls our attention to Perlstein’s grasp of the region’s history and political culture. Although one does not expect complete mastery in a story of this scope, his portrait of California has several gaps and flat sides. It would have benefited, I think, from Kathryn S. Olmsted’s analysis in Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (2015), which argues that California agribusiness served as the state’s political crucible during that turbulent decade. Businessmen forged a new kind of populism that combined corporate funding for grassroots efforts, sophisticated media campaigns, systematic intelligence-gathering on adversaries, and coalitions between religious and economic conservatives. That form of corporate populism was also characterized by its virulent anti-communism, which eventually spread from the state’s fields and canneries to Hollywood and the University of California. It is no accident, Olmsted notes, that Nixon and Reagan launched their political careers by attacking Communists real and imagined. Perlstein touches on related material, but Olmsted puts the movement’s origins into sharper focus.
Also absent are critiques by California leftists. Chief among them is Carey McWilliams, who has been described as “the state’s most astute political observer” (Kevin Starr) and “the California left’s one-man think tank” (Mike Davis). Although McWilliams was known back east for editing The Nation magazine, he was also tracking Nixon and Reagan as early as the 1940s. When Nixon ran for the Senate in 1950, McWilliams tagged him as “a dapper little man with an astonishing capacity for petty malice.” In the mid-1960s, when the conservative movement began to flex its muscles, McWilliams regularly challenged Nixon and Reagan in the pages of The Nation. In 1966, for example, he called out Reagan in an article called “How to Succeed with the Backlash.” In it, he described that year’s gubernatorial race as “one of the most subtle and intensive racist political campaigns ever waged in a Northern or Western state.” In the aftermath of the Watts Riots and the state’s fair-housing ordeal, McWilliams took note of Reagan’s dog whistles:
There won’t be much plain talk from Californians about the racism that they know permeates the Brown-Reagan contest. Most of them won’t talk about it at all if they can escape it. They don’t want the nation to know—they don’t want to admit to themselves—that the number-one state may elect Ronald Reagan governor in order to ‘keep the Negro in his place.’
Despite his perspicacity, or perhaps because of it, McWilliams never appears in Perlstein’s epic. He certainly did not play the part of the clueless liberal, one of Perlstein’s favorite types. Barely two years after Goldwater’s crushing defeat, McWilliams was well aware of the conservative movement’s growing power in California. Indeed, he warned that Pat Brown, the two-term incumbent, was in danger of losing to a former B-movie actor who had never held public office. Mainstream outlets largely ignored his charge of racism, preferring the weak sauce of consensus journalism, but McWilliams and others saw through Reagan in real time.
Perlstein’s most remarkable omission, however, concerns the Los Angeles Times. Quite simply, one cannot understand Southern California history or politics without a thorough consideration of that newspaper and its owners. For three generations, aspiring Republicans curried favor with the Chandler family. Norman Chandler later conceded that the Times strongly supported the GOP—not only on the op-ed page, but also in its news coverage. In fact, the newspaper had sabotaged Democratic candidates, including Upton Sinclair, whom the Times smeared regularly during his 1934 gubernatorial campaign. The paper’s political editor, Kyle Palmer, told a colleague, “We don’t go in for that kind of crap that you have back in New York—of being obliged to print both sides. We’re going to beat this son of a bitch Sinclair any way we can. We’re going to kill him.” That pattern changed in the 1960s, when Otis Chandler turned the Times into a respectable news organization. The Times became a less reliable advocate for GOP candidates, but it occupied an even larger niche in the national media ecology. Bitter about the newspaper’s new orientation, President Nixon ordered an investigation of Otis Chandler’s taxes. Perlstein probably understands the newspaper’s centrality; a note in the first volume recommends David Halberstam’s history of the Times during its early years. By my count, however, the newspaper receives only 13 passing mentions in all four volumes. Otis Chandler is cited once—in a passage about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Buff and Norman Chandler, who exerted enormous political, commercial, and cultural influence in Los Angeles, likewise receive one brief mention each.
When Perlstein focuses on California politics, the results are mixed. Howard Jarvis’s tax revolt receives ample discussion in Reaganland, as does Governor Jerry Brown’s response to it. Perlstein’s summary of the property tax issue is on point, but his depiction of Brown conforms to the Governor Moonbeam stereotype. “Jerry Brown was a strange man,” Perlstein asserts. “He drove his own used Plymouth sedan, slept on a mattress on the floor of his bachelor apartment, and spent his spare time at the San Francisco Zen Center.” Brown was by no means a conventional politician, but even now, nothing in Perlstein’s description seems especially odd to me. Nor does it capture Brown’s appeal. His trademark emphasis on limits and fiscal restraint, which Perlstein suggests were trumped by Reagan’s blue-sky optimism, turned out to be useful after the global economic meltdown of 2008. A byproduct of the Reagan revolution’s penchant for deregulation, that crisis brought California to the brink of insolvency, but Brown helped clean up the mess. Perhaps it is a matter of taste, but a figure like J. Edgar Hoover, who appears frequently in the early volumes, seems far stranger to me than Jerry Brown.
Reaganland also gives ample space to the Briggs Initiative, which sought to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in California. Harvey Milk figured prominently in that episode, and Perlstein quotes his Gay Freedom Day speech at length. Although Milk begged President Carter to denounce the initiative, it was Reagan who surprised everyone by taking a relatively soft line on the issue, and Orange County state senator John Briggs blamed him for the measure’s defeat. That outcome seems sane enough, but 200 pages later, Perlstein doubles down on his portrait of “oddball California.” He returns to the gay rights movement, recounts the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, and features Dan White’s trial. Relying heavily on Warren Hinckle’s coverage, he mistakes Hinckle for “a former New Left radical” and scrambles the sequence of the two events that staggered San Francisco: “Then came those assassinations, then Jonestown, within the space of ten awful days.” In fact, the Jonestown massacre preceded the City Hall slayings. Perlstein closes the episode with an interesting irony. The word neighborhood, he notes, was one of the “five simple, familiar, everyday words” that Reagan believed should guide every GOP message. After describing the Castro district riots that followed the White verdict, Perlstein adds that Reagan’s insight was a sound one: “Just look at how many people were willing to spill blood for their neighborhoods in San Francisco.” Of course, such conflicts were unthinkable in Reaganland. Although sparingly applied, Perlstein’s piquant sense of irony is one of his major assets.
Behind Perlstein’s project is a deceptively simple question: How did Ronald Reagan become the dominant American politician of his era? Reaganland is the most obvious place to address that question directly, but Perlstein largely coasts on his earlier claim that, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Reagan’s political success sprang from the tension between American optimism and pessimism. Reaganland recounts Jimmy Carter’s failed attempts to harness that tension, but as Perlstein notes in the previous volume, Reagan had already resolved it with a single (if dubious) theological stroke. In Reagan’s sunny view, even the country’s gravest mistakes, crimes, and sins were trivial compared to America’s divinely ordained role as leader of the free world. He considered the U.S. effort in Vietnam a noble cause, stood by Richard Nixon long after the Watergate scandal destroyed his presidency, and seemed untroubled by even the ugliest forms of racism. In Perlstein’s view, Reagan had “the capacity to cleanse any hint of doubt regarding American innocence. That was the soul of his political appeal: his liturgy of absolution.” When other conservatives spouted racist remarks and violent threats, that capacity was especially useful.
For all the differences between the two men, Reagan also endorsed Nixon’s peculiar sense of inculpability. Discussing the president’s role in national security, Nixon famously claimed, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” In effect, Reagan extended that immunity to the nation as a whole. In Reagan’s imaginary republic, America could do no wrong. If a person thought that about himself, we would consider him a sociopath. Now, four decades after Reagan’s victory, even the most casual observer can see that pathology on full display in the White House. This degeneration is perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of American political history since 1980. As political commentator Charles Pierce likes to say, that was the year the GOP ate the monkey brains. Despite its foibles, Reaganland shows exactly how that table was set.
“A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up,” Joan Didion wrote about her home state. The same was true of Reagan’s fantasies and simplifications. In the end, we paid for all of them, though Perlstein’s monumental work will not document that reckoning.
Peter Richardson teaches humanities at San Francisco State University, where he also coordinates the American Studies and California Studies programs. His books include No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead (2015); A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (2009); and American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams, which the University of California Press published in paperback in 2019.
Eighteenth-century prison reformer John Howard was endowed not only with a considerable fortune but with an inquisitive eye and a compassionate heart. In 1777, following his tour of more than one hundred prisons in England and Wales, Howard published The State of the Prisons, which opens as follows:
There are prisons, into which whoever looks will, at first sight of the people confined there, be convinced, that there is some great error in the management of them; the sallow meagre countenances declare, without words, that they are very miserable; many who went in healthy, are in a few months changed into emaciated dejected objects. Some are seen pining under diseases, “sick and in prison;” expiring on the floors, in loathsome cells, of pestilential fevers, and the confluent small-pox; victims, I must say not to the cruelty, but I will say to the inattention, of sheriffs, and gentlemen in the commission of the peace…. The cause of this distress is, that many prisons are scantily supplied, and some almost totally unprovided with the necessaries of life.[1]
The connection Howard made between incarceration and disease was fortified by his later adventures: after a brief stint as prison reform administrator, he returned to his travels, experiencing people’s fear of the plague and finding himself imprisoned at a lazaretto in Venice. Miasma and contagion are not only metaphors for the prison experience: they have been part and parcel of the reality of incarceration, to the point that the architecture of early American prisons was explicitly designed to prevent disease spread.[2]
Recently, at a press conference held in front of the San Quentin gates, Dr. Peter Chin-Hong from the University of California, San Francisco, eerily echoed Howard’s conclusions. Facing the COVID-19 crisis that has ravaged California prisons, and remembering the years-long struggle with valley fever infections in the same prisons,[3] he remarked that “prisons are incompatible with healthcare.”[4]
At the time of writing this particular essay, more than half of the incarcerated population of San Quentin has been infected with COVID-19.[5] There are 8,429 cases of the virus in California prisons—eight times the infection rate in the general state population—and only a little over half of the prison population has been tested. Fifty people have died, twenty-two of them at San Quentin and sixteen at the California Institute of Men in Chino. The crisis at San Quentin, brought about by a botched transfer of untested people from Chino,[6] has provoked outrage from advocates, activists, health care and criminal justice professionals. After the San Quentin press conference, which featured lawmakers and elected officials as well as formerly incarcerated people and loved ones of people directly impacted by the contagion, Governor Newsom announced the upcoming release of up to 8,000 prisoners.[7] Albeit a welcome initial step to alleviate virus-ravaged state prisons, I argue here that the strategy proposed by the Governor and CDCR will not suffice to stop the contagion and save lives.
My analysis places the Governor’s announcement in the context of California’s political culture and its historical struggle with overcrowded prisons and inadequate healthcare. Against a backdrop of decades of neglect, abuse, and iatrogenic disease and death, after pressure by federal courts the state released large numbers of prisoners starting in 2011. This was accomplished primarily via two statutory amendments: the Criminal Justice Realignment,[8] which shifted the responsibility for nonviolent, nonserious, nonsexual offenders (the “non-non-nons”) to the counties; and Prop. 47,[9] which reclassified some common felonies as misdemeanors. The good intentions behind these efforts, however, backfired in creating vague standards for overcrowding and in decentralizing the responsibility for people’s health by placing people in ill-prepared contexts. In addition, the focus on less-controversial categories of prisoners as reform targets, which made them more palatable to the public, ignored robust literature on the risk of reoffending. These well-intended reforms, against the backdrop of the horrors that preceded them and the political culture in which they were implemented, are at the root of today’s prison COVID-19 crisis; moreover, the reforms proposed now echo these flaws, and are therefore insufficient and ineffective to combat the pandemic threat, or offer any kind of comprehensive and compassionate reform.
In other words, not only is the COVID-19 crisis in prison a function of persistent structural, administrative, and persistent cultural-political conditions, but the proposed solution reflects and exploits these same weaknesses.
Context: California as a Populistic, Polarized State
In her book The Politics of Incarceration Vanessa Barker compares the political cultures of three states: California, Washington, and New York.[10] Barker attributes the different degrees of punitiveness in these three states to their levels and styles of civic engagement and to their political makeup. California’s political culture, which Barker refers to as “polarized populism,” is characterized by great contrasts between right and left, and by an emotion-driven referendum system, which is used frequently by parties with private interests and the ability to fund expensive public campaigns. In contrast to Washington’s political culture, which features a town-hall style deliberate democracy, and to the elitist-pragmatic principles characterizing New York, California’s culture renders it vulnerable to arguments based on high emotional valence.[11] In this environment, “redball crimes”—violent, heinous crimes, which are as rare as they are shocking—have a strong rhetorical pull, which is effectively utilized to introduce punitive voter initiatives,[12] particularly by California’s powerful prison guard union and its connections with victims’ rights organizations.[13] These characteristics prime our state conversations about criminal justice to revolve around, on one hand, a laissez-faire attitude and, on the other, a fear of crime (and so-called “criminals”), and particularly a reluctance to seriously consider nonpunitive reforms to sentencing and incarceration of people convicted of crime—especially “violent crime.”
These tendencies were exacerbated by California’s pioneering transition to a system of determinate sentencing in 1977, which removed the judges’ ability to sentence defendants by using a breadth of considerations and greatly limited the authority of parole boards to set prisoner release dates. Before this reform, California’s prisons, by contrast to Arizona and Texas’ “cheap justice” farm- and plantation-like institutions, were large bureaucratic creatures, driven by ideas of correction and rehabilitation fostered by employees from therapeutic professions who toiled in obscurity within the prison. The transition to a determinate sentencing model shifted the power from these professionals to elected officials: legislators, who responded to public emotions and demands by proposing punitive bills, and prosecutors, who had the power to choose charging offenses. Gradually, felony sentencing in California increased in length, largely due to the creation of sentencing enhancements and aggravating conditions, resulting in the largest prison population in the United States and in grossly overcrowded institutions.
Healthcare in California Prisons Before Brown v. Plata
The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Plata (2011),[14] which upheld a federal three-judge-panel order to alleviate prison overcrowding under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996 (PLRA), was the culmination of a decades-long litigation effort on behalf of incarcerated people seeking relief from the abysmal prison healthcare system. This drastic measure was adopted after several less extreme reforms failed, including placing the entire prison healthcare system in the hands of a federal receiver.[15] Despite eating up more than a fourth of the California correctional budget,[16] the healthcare system was a reign of chaos and neglect. Every six days, a prisoner would die from a preventable (sometimes iatrogenic) condition.[17] The case’s namesake was emblematic: Marciano Plata hurt himself in 1997 in the course of working in the prison kitchen and was unable to continue working in the prison kitchen. Unable to get adequate medical attention because of insufficient medical staffing, Plata’s condition worsened to the point that his knee required surgery, which took years to schedule.[18]
Throughout the Plata litigation, California prisons were grossly overcrowded at near 200% of their design capacity. “Bad beds”—triple bunks and makeshift beds in hallways and gyms—were a common sight in the system. These conditions hindered the system’s ability to provide basic healthcare for several reasons. Correctional medical personnel were (and still are) difficult to hire and retain, because of California’s unattractive correctional geography: large institutions in remote, rural locations.[19] Providing for necessities such as housing, clothing, and feeding on such a scale required considerable compromises in quality, making it difficult to introduce preventative health measures.[20] This problem was compounded by California’s increasingly lengthy sentences: as a consequence of repeated “public safety” legislation adding sentencing enhancements, one fourth of the current prison population has a life sentence, producing an aging population in increasingly poor health, which requires more chronic and expensive healthcare.[21] Under these circumstances, registration and pharmaceutical services became disorganized and dated. Even when people were finally taken to medical appointments, they would be required to wait for long hours in tiny holding cages without access to bathrooms. Taking prisoners to medical appointments often required lockdowns, which in turn created more delays and administrative hassles. And the prisoners’ medical complaints were regularly trivialized and disbelieved—not, usually, out of sadism, but out of fatigue and indifference in the face of so much need. Indeed, by 2006, the Federal Receiver overseeing the prison medical system and the Special Master overseeing the mental health system reported that overcrowding was impeding their ability to effectuate change, and Gov. Schwarzenegger proclaimed a state prison crowding emergency.[22] The link between the severe overcrowding and the conditions of the prison medical system was an important step toward the resolution of Plata. The PLRA, under which incarcerated people and their advocates sought relief, places numerous hurdles on prison rights litigation in general, and on population reduction orders in particular; such orders may be entered only by a three-judge district court, after the panel ascertains that prior attempts to alleviate prison conditions have failed to bring prison conditions into compliance with constitutional requirements, that overcrowding is the primary cause of the violation, and that no other relief will remedy the conditions.
The Era of Plata: Recession-Era Reforms and Their Limitations
The late 2000s were years of transformation not only in California, but nationwide, due to a confluence of events. The advent of the 2008 financial crisis plunged state and local governments into a deep recession, which awakened interest in local budgets, of which correctional expenditures were a considerable share.[23] The realization that incarceration on such a scale was financially unsustainable created the opportunity for bipartisan coalitions at the state and federal levels,[24] dovetailing with the Obama Administration’s focus on criminal justice reform and racial justice.[25] Part and parcel of these coalition-building efforts was the need to focus the proposed reforms on low-hanging fruit, in the form of politically palatable populations, such as nonviolent drug offenders, which received the bulk of reformist attention both from the right[26] and the left.[27]
Against this backdrop, the litigation in Plata hurtled forward, and the PLRA conditions for population reduction were finally met. In 2009, the three-judge panel found overcrowding to be the primary cause of the health care system’s dysfunction and acknowledged that prior attempts to improve the situation had failed. Consequently, the panel ordered a reduction of California’s prison population to 137.5% of system-wide design capacity—admittedly, a drastic population cut that the state would continue to fight tooth and nail all the way to the Supreme Court—but shied away from specifying how the population reduction was to be done.[28] Theoretically, the state could have built more prisons to alleviate overcrowding, but recession-era cuts impeded this course of action; another possibility, relying on private contractors, was blocked by conflicting political interests.[29] In 2011, as Plata made its way to the Supreme Court, Gov. Brown continued the path charted by his predecessor, Gov. Schwarzenegger,[30] and signed extensive legislation that many considered “the greatest experiment” in American corrections.[31] Under the Criminal Justice Realignment,[32] people convicted of “non-non-non” offenses—nonviolent, nonsexual, nonserious—would serve their sentence in county jails, rather than in state prisons. This would internalize the costs of incarceration and eliminate the problem that several scholars have referred to as the “correctional free lunch”: prosecutors asking for, and judges meting out, lengthy prison sentences in county courts, oblivious to the “price tag”—the costs of incarceration, which would be borne by state agencies.[33] Judges were given more discretion regarding sentencing, to alleviate incarceration and, in most cases, the state system’s parole supervision functions were transferred to community probation offices, which would now handle both probation (a sanction, typically viewed as an alternative to incarceration) and parole (post-incarceration supervision).
From State to Counties
The implementation of Realignment meant that tens of thousands of people, who were under the auspices (and financial responsibility) of the state, would now be housed, clothed, and fed at the county level. Many scholars and policymakers who welcomed this jurisdictional shift thought that counties would be better positioned to connect people with rehabilitation and reentry services because of their stronger ties to the home communities of incarcerated people, and that healthcare at the state level was so dire that the counties would surely do better.[34]
But the assumption that jails would be an improvement neglected to consider several factors. The first of these, which law professor Margo Schlanger referred to as the “hydra problem,” was concern about the impact that a decentralized health care system would create, making it more difficult to monitor and implement improvement: i.e., rather than following the health care instructions and practices in one jurisdiction (the state), prison rights advocates would now have to obtain information about conditions and mismanagement in each of the counties as well, and possibly begin new, separate litigation efforts against each county. In addition, there were the inherent limitations of county facilities. Jails, originally built to house people only for short terms (pretrial or for less than a year), were ill-equipped to deal with a population in need of both acute and chronic healthcare. The extent to which counties proved equal to the task varied greatly: while some counties made efforts to prevent incarceration well ahead of the anticipated legislation and court decisions, others, in panic, started building jails[35] or changing revenue structures to roll expenses onto the inmates themselves. Such structure include “pay to stay” jails, in which people pay for their own incarceration (as if they were staying in a hotel) through liens on their post-incarceration earnings, or more opaque practices: monetizing and charging for haircuts, food, and some healthcare services.[36] The gaps in implementation were also reflected in divergent reliance on incarceration among judges in different counties.[37] These divergent patterns were unfortunately exacerbated by the formula for funding the newly burdened county systems, which was initially based on the counties’ respective incarceration rates; this funding mechanism rewarded counties that relied more on incarceration and penalized those who developed alternatives to it, disincentivizing courts, sheriff’s departments, and probation services from investing more in non-carceral options.[38]
Bifurcation and the Violent/Nonviolent Dichotomy
Related to the “hydra problem” was the fact that the new sentencing and jurisdictional rules applied only to the “non-non-nons,” which were considered an easier “sell” from a public appeal perspective. Realignment was not unique in that respect. Generally speaking, recession-era reforms were characterized by a bifurcation element: they applied to nonviolent offenders and retrenched negative public opinion about so-called violent offenders.
This distinction was based on several empirically unfounded myths, the first of which was that the American correctional predicament was due mostly to the incarceration of non-level offenders. In fact, drug offenders—the recipients of bipartisan sympathies, and justifiably so given the racial disparities in drug enforcement—have constantly been no more than a fourth of the state prison population nationwide, whereas people convicted of “violent” offenses constituted a majority of those in state prisons.[39] In California, especially after the legislative changes in 2011 and 2014, three quarters of the prison population are people convicted of “violent” crimes.[40] A related myth was the perception that violent offenders posed a greater risk to public safety—which, when empirically tested, proved to be untrue.[41] In California, specifically, the focus on the crime of conviction led the legal system to ignore a fourth of the prison population—the people serving the state’s three most extreme sentence: incarceration on death row, life without parole, and life with parole. Because of the rarity of executions in California and the rarity of release on parole, these three punishments merged into an “extreme punishment trifecta,”[42] consisting of decades behind bars. Greatly overlapping with this category were prisoners aged fifty and above[43] who, as a consequence of serving extremely lengthy sentences, had not only aged out of crime,[44] but also incurred disabilities and chronic health conditions. Well-meaning reforms, therefore, calcified public opinion against the people who were wrongly perceived, because of their crime of commitment, to pose risks to public safety while, at the same time, facing increased risks to their own health because of their age and the prison conditions they have endured during their lengthy sentences. California’s aforementioned political culture[45] tends to emotional arguments building on heinous (albeit very rare) violent crimes, and public opinion has been remarkably resistant to the idea of distinguishing between, and extending compassion to, people convicted of violent crimes.
System-Wide Population Reduction
Another well-meaning aspect of the Plata reforms was that the court order required a population reduction in the system as a whole, rather than per individual institution. Part of the vagueness of the order was due to the already-extreme measure of relying on the PLRA to require an enormous state-wide effort. However, the choice of litigation strategy also mattered. By contrast to European and international standards, which measure humane incarceration standards based on a minimal square area per prisoner,[46] the order in California did not go so far as to ensure that each inmate would have adequate space—only that the average inmate in the entire system would. For years after the Plata decision, there was considerable variety in the occupation rates of state prisons, with some prisons still at pre-Plata capacity while others were at capacity or even slightly below. The impact of the decision, therefore, was not inclusive of all inmates.
Crisis and Mismanagement
Against the backdrop of these vulnerabilities—fragmented correctional institutions, rising to divergent standards and accountable to different local governments, a legacy of challenges providing minimal healthcare, uneven occupancy rates, and the perception that public opinion is dead-set against the releases of violent prisoners—came the triggers: the pandemic and a few crucial mismanagement steps by CDCR and by county jails. Some of these problems are evident from CDCR’s own tracking tool, but some we know about only from journalistic exposés—especially the ones pertaining to local jails. As of July 13, CDCR has tested 43.4% of its prison population, but testing rates have widely ranged between institutions. In the first two weeks of July, 55% of the California Correctional Center population was tested, but only 2% of the Kern Valley State Prison were tested, and percentages of tests ranges from 97% at Amador to 11.4% at Chuckawalla. More than half of San Quentin’s population tested positive, with nine deaths since mid-July, most of them being individuals on death row.[47] Bizarrely, if death row isolation, where people are housed in single-occupancy cells, is not sufficient protection from contagion, it is unclear where and how the prison can prevent contagion through social distancing.
The contagion on death row raises unique issues. In 2019, after decades in which the state had sentenced people to death only to see them languish for decades on death row, waiting for legal representation to enable them postconviction litigation, Gov. Newsom placed a moratorium on the death penalty. During these decades—and even now, because the death penalty is still on the books—the state has spent billions of dollars “tinkering with the machinery of death” by litigating minute technicalities of executions, such as the type and number of drugs to be injected.[48] Extensive appellate proceedings have gotten into the minutiae of convicts’ physical and mental health, to ensure that they are healthy enough to be killed by the state. This endless technical litigation seems particularly absurd as hundreds of inmates may face a death sentence via COVID-19. Even those who might secretly harbor the thought that such a sentence on death row might be appropriate would be surprised to know that capital trials are notoriously arbitrary and inefficient, and do not effectively single out “the worst of the worst” for capital punishment.[49] Even to the extent that it is possible to qualitatively differentiate between more or less heinous homicides (our Penal Code does so through lists of aggravating circumstances), who ends up on death row is not necessarily a function of the heinousness of the crime, but rather of the quality of the theatrical spectacle for the jury. The recent jury decision to sentence Joseph DeAngelo, the notorious “Golden State Killer,” to life without parole reflects the pragmatic realization that, with the death chamber dismantled, any meaning attached to a symbolic death sentence, as well as the costly expenditure of time and finances that will flow from postconviction litigation, is unnecessary.[50]
An additional trigger is the mismanagement of transfers between institutions during the pandemic. Reportedly, the outbreak at San Quentin is a function of a botched transfer of prisoners from the California Institute of Men in Chino, the site of a serious (and now almost abated) contagion. The prisoners were not tested before being transferred.[51] This scenario then replicated itself: prisoners from San Quentin, in turn, were transferred to the California Correctional Center (CCC) in Susanville and not tested or quarantined upon arrival,[52] resulting in hundreds of cases, with the infection unabated as of mid-July. While another prison in Susanville, High Desert State Prison, has only seen four cases as of mid-July, testing rates there are remarkably low and it is overcrowded at 154% of its capacity, raising concerns about the possibility of preventing much worse outcomes through social distancing.
Beyond the concerns for people behind bars are the concerns for the effect of prison contagion on the surrounding communities. CDCR confirms 1,243 cases among its staff, 205 of which are at San Quentin. Comparing CDCR data about infections within the prison with the Los Angeles Times statistics[53] for the neighboring counties shows a temporal link between the outbreak at San Quentin and the soaring number of cases in the surrounding community.[54] Similarly, the spike in cases in Lassen County occurred after the outbreak at CCC. In both cases, without contact tracing, it is impossible to provide an airtight causal story; the temporal link, however, raises serious concerns that attempting to incubate the virus in prisons puts the entire community at risk.
The interplay between the prison and the community seems to have finally driven home the point that prisoners reside in the county in which the prison is located for the duration of their incarceration, whether or not they are (or should) being “counted” as such for purposes such as the US Census.[55] Realizing that Lassen County people’s health depends, in part, on health outcomes inside Lassen County’s prisons, Brian and Megan Dahle, respectively a Senator and an Assembly Member for Lassen County’s First District wrote a letter to CDCR Secretary Ralph Diaz asking him “to provide answers on questionable protocols that have led to a surge of inmate #COVID19 cases in Lassen County.”[56] Reportedly, despite arguments about jurisdiction, the prison and county are finally working together to test the prison population.[57] This collaboration is less likely to play out in Marin County, where the identity and livelihood of the community is less tied to its local prison than at Susanville, “Prison Town, U.S.A.”[58]
The concerns about prison outbreaks, at this point, go beyond the extreme outbreaks at San Quentin, Avenal, CIM, and CCI. A careful look at the CDCR contagion data reveals several locations at which the status of contagion is still unclear given the lack of testing and the paucity of information about transfers—what Donald Rumsfeld referred to, in a different context, as the “known unknowns.”[59] In some prisons, the outbreak seems to have reached its peak and abated; in others, it continues unabated. In some prisons, there have been new outbreaks after previous waves had seemingly abated. Some prisons have only a handful of cases; because these prisons, for the most part, have tested only a small percentage of their population, it is impossible to know whether contagion has been contained or the few cases are the beginning of a serious outbreak. And while several prisons have had no cases at all, it remains to be seen whether administrative blunders in the form of population transfers or insufficient staff protocols will introduce the virus into these institutions and their environs.
Finally, there is the matter of another “known unknown”: the situation in California’s county jails. As outbreaks were reported in several jails, notably at Alameda,[60] San Bernardino, Riverside,[61] Fresno, and Tulare counties,[62] the respective Sheriff’s Departments did not provide statistics on infections and hospitalizations on their webpages. Indeed, UCLA’s new data collection project on COVID-19 in correctional institutions led by Sharon Dolovich impressively covers state and federal prisons, but only a handful of jails, because information has been so scant.[63] The five-month delay in obtaining reliable statistics on county jail infections statewide is an important social fact, which undergirds Schlanger’s “hydra problem”: by contrast to CDCR, which provides an informative tracking tool, the fifty-nine counties have had different approaches as to reportage, and even those who report statistics do not do so in a uniform manner. Only as late as five months into the crisis, the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) finally required county sheriffs to provide contagion statistics on jails.[64] The resulting database offers partial information, with no historical or cumulative data.[65] The gaps between official COVID-19 policies as listed on county sheriffs’ websites and the realities on the ground became a matter of public record when the Orange County Sheriff was sued for providing inadequate precautions. After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Sheriff to enforce social distancing and provide the inmates with soap, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, stayed the injunction, thus temporarily relieving the Sheriff from these obligations. The decision was surprising, to say the least, because stays are not usually granted when the Supreme Court is unlikely to grant certiorari and reverse the decision on the merits; it was particularly surprising because there was ample proof of substantial harm to the jail population. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote:
Although the Jail had been warned that “social distancing is the cornerstone of reducing transmission of COVID–19,” inmates described being transported back and forth to the jail in crammed buses, socializing in dayrooms with no space to distance physically, lining up next to each other to wait for the phone, sleeping in bunk beds two to three feet apart, and even being ordered to stand closer than six feet apart when inmates tried to socially distance. Moreover, although the Jail told its inmates that they could “best protect” themselves by washing their hands with “soap and water throughout the day,” numerous inmates reported receiving just one small, hotel-sized bar of soap per week. And after symptomatic inmates were removed from their units, other inmates were ordered to dispose of their belongings without gloves or other protective equipment. Finally, despite the Jail’s stated policy to test and isolate individuals who reported or exhibited symptoms consistent with COVID-19, multiple symptomatic detainees described being denied tests, and others recounted sharing common spaces with infected or symptomatic inmates.[1][66]
Beyond the distressing fact that the county preferred to spend its resources petitioning the Supreme Court for a stay, rather than providing its jail population with adequate amounts of soap, the case raises concerns about the situation in other jails. While it is impossible to make definitive extrapolations from the Orange County example, the divergence between the jail’s “health and safety” protocols per its website and the practices on the ground as reported by the jail populations suggest that the official policies are no assurance that people serving short sentences—and people who are in pretrial detention, and thus presumed innocent—are receiving adequate protections from infection.
The Proposed Solution: Case-by-Case Releases of Non-Non-Nons?
On July 10, a day after activists and elected officials held a press conference before the San Quentin gate, Gov. Newsom announced impending releases of 8,000 people. In the heels of his announcement, CDCR issued a press release detailing the plan.[67] The plan closely resembles the strategies adopted in 2011 and 2014 to trim the prison population: it focuses on the relatively less controversial moves of hastening the release dates of people sentenced for nonviolent crimes who are nearing the end of their sentences. More particularly, the plan consists of the following steps:
Release 4,800 people with 180 days left on their sentences, who are not serving time for violence or domestic violence, nor are to register as sex offenders.
Release an undetermined number of people with a year left on their sentence for a nonviolent, nonsex crime, who are incarcerated at an outbreak epicenter: San Quentin State Prison (SQ), Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), California Health Care Facility (CHCF), California Institution for Men (CIM), California Institution for Women (CIW), California Medical Facility (CMF), Folsom State Prison (FOL) and Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility (RJD). Those aged 30 and over are immediately eligible; younger people will be reviewed case-by-case by CDCR.
A 12-week programming credit (hastening the date of release) to all those not on death row or serving life without parole who don’t have a serious violation on their record since March 1. “Serious rules violations” while in prison range from murder to possession of a cellphone. This category of those who have no serious violations since March 1 encompasses 108,000 people, out of which 2,100 would advance to the point of being eligible for release between July and September.
Case-by-case assessment for release of people aged over 65 with a chronic medical condition or with respiratory illnesses, who have been assessed as low risk for violence and who are not on death row, serving life without parole, or high-risk sex offenders.
Individual assessment for release of people in hospice or pregnant, as well as expediting release for people who have been granted parole (including the governor’s approval.)
The plan, regardless of its particulars, is an important first step. For the individuals who will be released, the plan could spell relief from illness and death; the gradual release schedule, albeit not ideal from a pandemic prevention perspective, offers a silver lining that might allow some people to better plan their future on the outside, especially against the backdrop of a terrible economy. Nonetheless, it is woefully insufficient to stop the virus in its tracks, for four reasons: it is too modest, too late, too reactive, and too restrictive.
First, the overall number is far too modest. 8,000 releases—a mere 6% of the current prison population of approximately 125,000—would not allow prison healthcare officials to institute appropriate social distancing measures. In some institutions, the need to release massive numbers of people is even more pressing. In mid-June, a team of physicians specializing in prison healthcare published a report about a site visit to San Quentin,[68] in which they recommended that, due to San Quentin’s age and decrepitude, the population there specifically be reduced to 50% of current capacity. Many of the problems are not endemic to San Quentin: according to the July 8 population count,[69] 26 facilities—24 for men, 2 for women—are overcrowded beyond design capacity. Nine facilities are overcrowded above the 137.5% Plata standard (had the standard been applied to individual prisons, rather than systemwide), and ten more are overcrowded above 120% of their design capacity. Under these conditions, releasing a total of 8,000 people will not even nearly allow the kind of social distancing necessary to halt pandemic spread.
Second, the plan relies heavily on individualized, case-by-case evaluations. The time to take such careful measures has long passed; for months, criminal justice scholars issued warnings of prison contagion, to no avail.[70] Given the spread of the epidemic, CDCR must resort to triage measures, which approach people in broader categories of age and risk.
Third, the plan is reactive to the point of being already dated at its publication. The list of prisons that CDCR prioritizes for releases, published on June 10, already overlooked new outbreaks at several prisons. Moreover, the plan excluded places in which the pandemic had seemingly abated, even though testing levels were partial and unsatisfactory, and did not provide a true sense of pandemic activity. The prisons listed in the press release already are already ravaged by a robust outbreak, and releasing vigorously from those particular locations, while helpful in terms of treating people, would not help with prevention.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the plan’s restrictions on categories for release echoes previous efforts to curb unfounded public backlash at the expense of actual facts and public health. The release plan targets, yet again, a version of the “non-non-nons”: nonserious, nonviolent, nonsexual offenders. Before and after the 2011 and 2014 releases, prison scholars in California and elsewhere conducted robust research on risk assessment and have concluded time and again that there is no correlation between the crime of commitment and the risk to public safety.[71]
The choice to focus, yet again, on “non-non-nons” is particularly worrisome in the current crisis because it stubbornly evades addressing the most obvious category of people for release: people who have been serving lengthy sentences for violent crimes committed decades ago. As robust literature on life-course criminology shows,[72] people age out of violent street crime by their mid- to late-twenties, and by the time they are fifty years old, pose virtually no public safety risk; indeed, parole officers repeatedly express a preference for working with former lifers because they are such a low-risk population.[73] This category, which constitutes a quarter of the prison population,[74] is an ideal target for release: they do not pose significant risk to public safety and, at the same time, they face enhanced risk to their own health and, by extension—if the virus is incubated in the prisons—to the health of others if they remain incarcerated.
Conclusion
It is hard to contemplate the grim picture in California’s prisons and not feel frustration with the lack of progress since John Howard indicted prisons of being incubators of disease in 1777. Whether the COVID-19 crisis in California prisons can be attributed to “cruelty” or “inattention,” a question that did not matter to the horrified Howard, is one that might matter in litigation, but at this point it suffices to say that much of it was preventable and foreseeable. The well-meaning champions of Plata can hardly be blamed for seeking a remedy that seemed, at the time, to address a systemic ill; but against the backdrop of prison conditions and of the limitations of the Plata remedy, state authorities should have acted as early as March to release people from prison and alleviate overcrowding, particularly in antiquated, decrepit facilities. The late and tepid reaction in July reverts to our state’s characteristic approach to crime and punishment. California’s populistic, polarized political culture has led elected officials, time after time, to seek solutions that raise as little controversy as possible—and time after time, such solutions have proven inefficient. This time, too, officials might be hoping that, by cobbling together palatable candidates for release, the numbers will somehow add up to sufficient prevention. Unfortunately, they won’t.
The Governor must make use of the many “levers” that open prison doors at his disposal. In a universe of moratorium, it is not beyond imagination to commute all death sentences, and all life without parole sentences, to life with parole, and speed early release policies, commutations, parole hearings, and resentencing. It is imperative to let go of concerns about the optics of releasing people who, decades ago, were sentenced for violent crime, and to follow risk assessments that prioritize aging and failing health.
It is equally essential to make a concerted effort to dramatically ramp up testing, so as to test as close to 100% of the prison population as possible. The muddled picture of infection needs to clear up considerably before the points of contact between prisons and the community can accurately be pinpointed and further transfer fiascos avoided. For a voluntary testing program to be effective, it is crucial to communicate that no retaliatory or negative consequences will stem from testing positive—and that includes refraining from the use of death row and solitary confinement cells, which carry terrifying connotations, for the purpose of medical isolation.[75]
Prison authorities must also exercise extreme caution when transferring people between facilities. No transfers must be made to institutions that have no active cases. Similarly, messaging and instructions to staff must take into account their crucial role in prevention.
Finally, county jails are a hidden but important dimension of the COVID-19 challenge. Counties must liaise with CDCR and install matching tracking tools for each county jail.
Where the blame lies, and whether it is cruelty or inattention, matters less than the pressing need to overcome this crisis; mostly, it is paramount to understand that prisons are not separate from the communities in which they are located. Prisons are part of the community, and prisoners are members of the community, and prevention strategies must see them as such.
Notes
[1] John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with an Account of Some Foreign Prisons (1977), cited in Andrew Barrett and Chris Harrison, eds., Crime and Punishment in England: A Sourcebook (London: UCL Press, 1999), 173.
[8] Public Safety Realignment Act (AB 109) (2011).
[9] California Proposition 47, the Reduced Penalties for Some Crimes Initiative (approved Nov. 2014).
[10] Vanessa Barker, The Politics of Imprisonment How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[11] California’s culture can also be seen as somewhat overlapping the punitive politics of what Mona Lynch refers to as the “sunbelt: Mona Lynch, Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009. It alsoshares some characteristics with Florida’s culture: Heather Schoenfeld, Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
[12] Hadar Aviram, Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020).
[13] Joshua Page, The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officers Union in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[18] Jonathan Simon, Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America (New York: The New Press, 2014).
[19] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Oakland: University of California Press, 2006).
[23] Hadar Aviram, Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
[24] David Dagan and Steven M. Teles, Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[27] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010). For a critique of Alexander’s excessive focus on drug crimes, see James Forman, “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” New York University Law Review 87/101-150 (2012).
[29] This was not so much out of a principled resistance to private entrepreneurs, but due to fierce objection on the part of California’s prison guards’ union, which protested against a prison built by a private company on speculation: Page, The Toughest Beat, . In 2013, the state did, however, enter a contract to operate this speculative prison, the California City Correctional Center (CAC). Christine Bedell, “Cal City Prison to House State Inmates,” Bakersfield.com, October 25, 2013, https://www.bakersfield.com/news/cal-city-prison-to-house-state-inmates/article_41af12cd-3acf-5a21-9485-30b7ce8af4cb.html.
[30] Joan Petersilia, “A Retrospective View of Corrections Reform in the Schwarzenegger Administration,” Federal Sentencing Reporter 22/3 (2010): 148-153.
[31] Charis Kubrin and Caroll Seron, eds., The Great Experiment: Realigning Criminal Justice in California and Beyond, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 664/1 (2016.
[33] Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, The Scale of Imprisonment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 211; W. David Ball, “Defunding State Prisons,” Criminal Law Bulletin 50 (2014): 1060-1089.
[34] Margo Schlanger, “Plata v. Brown and Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, and Politics,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 481 (2013): 165-215.
[38] David Ball, “Tough on Crime (on the State’s Dime): How Violent Crime Does Not Drive California Counties’ Incarceration Rates—And Why it Should,” Georgia State L. Rev. 28 (2012): 987-1084.
[39] John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017). The only setting in which this is not true is the federal prison population, which is approximately one tenth of the national prison population.
[46] Holly Cartner, Prison Conditions in Romania, Human Rights Watch (1992), 8. Eric Goldstein, Prison Conditions in Israel and in the Occupied Territories, Human Rights Watch (1991), 29.
[47] Cassidy and Fagone, “Coronavirus Tears Through San Quentin’s Death Row.”
[48] Hadar Aviram and Ryan S. Newby, “Death Row Economics: The Rise of Fiscally Prudent Anti-Death-Penalty Activism,” Criminal Justice 28 (2013): 33-41.
[49] Sarah Beth Kaufman, American Roulette: The Social Logic of Death Penalty Sentencing Trials (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020); Paul Kaplan, Murder Stories: Ideological Narratives in Capital Punishment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), 2012.
[71] For a summary of this body of literature see Susan Turner, “Moving California Corrections from an Offense- to Risk-Based System.”
[72] Robert Sampson and John Laub, “Life-Course Desisters? Trajectories of Crime Among Delinquent Boys Followed to Age 70,” Criminology 41 (2003): 555-592.
Caitlin V. M. Cornelius, Christopher J. Lynch, and Ross Gore, “Aging Out of Crime: Exploring the Relationship between Age and Crime with Agent-Based Modeling,” Society for Modeling and Simulation International, 2017.
[74] Heather Harris, et al., “California’s Prison Population.”
[75] See the physicians’ caveat about this regrettable practice in McCoy et al., “Urgent Memo – COVID-19 Outbreak: San Quentin Prison.”
Hadar Aviram is Professor of Law at UC Hastings and a frequent media commentator on politics, criminal justice policy, and civil rights. She is author of Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment (UC Press, 2015) and Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole (UC Press, 2020) and her blog, California Correctional Crisis, covers criminal justice policy in California. She served as President of the Western Society of Criminology and on the Board of Trustees of the Law and Society Association, and is currently the Book Review Editor of the Law & Society Review.
“Victory Parade, ca. 1918.” Van Covert Martin, photographer. Soldiers march along East Main Street, Stockton, California, in front of Tredway Brothers store during the influenza pandemic. Many Californians were among those the United States sent to East Asia as part of the Siberian Expedition. Scholars do not know if Californians carried the disease with them, contracted it in Siberia, or both. Courtesy Holt-Atherton Special Collections (Western Americana), University of the Pacific Library,
The 1918–1920 influenza pandemic remains the deadliest influenza pandemic in recorded history. It began in the midst of World War I (1914–1918), as millions of combatants fought on the battlefields of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, and at sea. The exceptionally contagious, unknown strain of influenza virus spread rapidly and attacked all ages. Whereas previous epidemics had affected those under five years of age or the elderly, the new virus especially targeted young adults, ages twenty to forty-four—the age range of sailors, marines, soldiers, pilots, physicians, nurses, and support staff. Influenza spread from person to person by close contact, especially through sneezing, coughing, or sharing items such as drinking cups. Key transmission vectors within the military included training camps, in transit aboard trains or ships, and along the front lines of battlefields. Key transmission vectors for civilians included refugee camps, crowded cities, transportation services, factories, and public gatherings. There were no ventilators, vaccines, antibiotics, or antiviral medicines to help the pandemic’s victims. An estimated 50–100 million people died worldwide, many from complications of pneumonia. Approximately 500 million, or one-third of the world’s population, became infected.[1] More U.S. military personnel died from influenza than from battlefield wounds.[2]
This article examines the evolution of four waves of the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, emphasizes the role of the U.S. Navy and sea travel as the initial transmitters of the virus in the United States, and focuses on California as a case study in the response to the crisis. Although the world war, limited medical science, and the unknown nature of the virus made it extremely difficult to fight the disease, the responses of national, state, and community leaders to the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic can provide useful lessons in 2020, as the onslaught of the novel coronavirus (or SARS-CoV-2) that causes the disease, COVID-19, forces people worldwide to confront a terrible illness and death.
“Victory Parade, ca. 1918.” Van Covert Martin, photographer. American Red Cross (ARC) nurses march during the influenza pandemic along North Hunter Street, Stockton, California, in front of the Boston Rooms, Hunter Square Café, and the Willard Hardware Company. In addition to serving with the ARC on the home front, California women served with the ARC and the U.S. Army in Europe and Siberia and with the U.S. Navy aboard ships at sea. Courtesy Holt-Atherton Special Collections (Western Americana), University of the Pacific Library)
Problems with 1918–1920 Data
From the outset, it is important to acknowledge several difficulties in understanding the historical complexity of the influenza pandemic: its geographic origin, the precise arrival times as the contagion spread worldwide, and its deadly impact. Scholars continue to debate the geographic origin of the pandemic—the battlefields of western France, the United States, or the Far East.[3] Another challenge is related to charting the path of infection as it reached different populations at different times. The same dilemma exists with the COVID-19 pandemic. After the virus spread from China, U.S. health officials originally thought that the first U.S. COVID-19 death occurred in Washington state on February 26, 2020, but new evidence suggests that the first death occurred in Santa Clara County, California, on February 6, 2020. Dr. Sara Cody, the county’s health officer, recognized that the virus had gone undetected in the United States during January and early February 2020.[4] This news will change as physicians learn more.
More importantly, scholars today warn that the worldwide morbidity and mortality numbers for the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic are understated.[5] In the United States, the available statistics give an incomplete picture of the magnitude of the disease. Between 1918 and 1920, the U.S. population grew slightly, from 103 million to 106.5 million. During that time, an estimated 850,000 people died from influenza and pneumonia. However, out of forty-eight states, only thirty contributed to the 1918 Bureau of Census Mortality Statistics, and only twenty-four states contributed to the 1919 report. In 1920, the bureau was able to count only an estimated 82.3 percent of the U.S. population, including the Territory of Hawaii.[6] In California, with an estimated population of 2.3 to 3.4 million between 1918 and 1920, approximately 29,738 died of influenza and pneumonia during those years, but these data also are unreliable (Table 1).[7]
Not until the last week of September 1918 did the surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) designate influenza as a “reportable” disease and request that all public health officials telegraph weekly reports of incidences, even though, by then, the disease had spread to twenty-seven states, including California. Responding to the federal directive, the executive officer of the California State Board of Health (CSBH), Dr. Wilfred H. Kellogg, wrote to all city and county health officers on September 27, 1918, advising that the communicable disease, influenza, now qualified as “reportable and isolatable” under Section 2979 of the Political Code. Kellogg authorized California health officials to “require the isolation of cases appearing in your community, it being hoped in this manner to check the rapid spread of the disease, which otherwise appears inevitable.”[8]
Evolution of the First Wave: The United States and the World, January–July 1918
Scholars now generally accept that the influenza pandemic arrived in the United States in three waves, in spring 1918, autumn–winter 1918, and winter–spring 1919. More recent research identifies a possible fourth wave in the winter and spring of 1920.[9] Some sources suggest that the initial U.S. outbreak appeared at U.S. Army bases in Kansas in March or April of 1918.[10] However, a careful reading of contemporary reports issued by the U.S. Navy and the USPHS provides more precise and generally overlooked information about the infection’s first-wave arrival times in the United States and around the world. Naval records are particularly germane to California, with its 1,200-mile coastline, significant seaports, U.S. Navy and Army installations, and the constant movement of people and goods on ships traveling around the entire Pacific Rim and through the Panama Canal.
U.S.S. Minneapolis (Cruiser # 13), with the ship’s commander, Captain Rufus Z. Johnston (seated right of center), and the ship’s surgeon and hospital corpsmen, 1918. The navy recorded the first outbreak of “suspicious” influenza aboard this ship in January 1918 when twenty-one sailors became ill. Photograph NH 46179. Courtesy U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command
The U.S. Navy’s surgeon general described the first “suspicious outbreak of influenza” on board the U.S.S. Minneapolis at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in January, 1918, where twenty-one sailors became ill.[11] By February 1918, as the navy continued to train sailors and marines and protect U.S. merchant ships carrying food and supplies to Europe from German submarine attacks, medical officers recorded approximately 700 influenza cases, including at the navy yards in Portsmouth, NH, Boston, and New York. Of the 700 cases, 350–400 occurred at the U.S. Naval Radio School at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[12] Physicians treating patients at the radio school observed eleven influenza cases with complications due to streptococcus pneumonia. Here, the navy’s description presents another dimension to the disease—the acute role of pneumonia in the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic—and demonstrates the importance of keeping accurate, detailed records during the COVID-19 pandemic due to the complex presence of pneumonia in certain of its sufferers.[13]
The geographic areas affected by influenza expanded in March 1918. The navy reported approximately 300 cases on ships stationed along the U.S. eastern seaboard.[14] By April 1918, as the United States trained and transported more troops, influenza numbers among navy personnel rose to over a thousand, including sailors and marines aboard ships along the southeastern and Gulf coasts and in Cuba, France, and California. In the latter state alone, there were 450 cases (and one death) on the U.S.S. Oregon in the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, 120 cases at the submarine base in San Pedro, and 410 cases at the San Diego Naval Training Camp (for further details, see below).[15]
U.S.S. Oregon (BB-3). During April 1918, at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, 410 sailors stationed aboard this ship suffered from influenza and one died. Photograph NH 63387. Courtesy U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command
As military operations intensified, the navy’s 478 influenza cases chronicled in May 1918 show that the disease’s geographic area swelled to ships and shore stations in Ireland, Scotland, England, France, and Gibraltar.[16]
During the summer of 1918, the first wave of the pandemic continued to spread. Many Californians were among those the United States sent to Russia as part of the ill-fated Siberian Expedition. Scholars do not know if they carried the disease with them, contracted it in Siberia as the men mingled with local residents, or both. However, as navy ships traveled across the Pacific in June, the surgeon general recorded first-wave incidences at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and Vladivostok, Siberia, in June 1918. In the former, 125 sailors on the U.S.S. Monterey—or 66 percent of the crew—suffered from influenza. In the latter, the disease remained prevalent among the crew of the U.S.S. Brooklyn for eight weeks, with no morbidity or mortality figures given.[17]
By July 1918, the first wave had struck seamen aboard ships at Key West, Florida (U.S.S. Tallahassee, 76 cases), and the Azores (U.S.S. Galatea, 30 cases). Reflecting the escalation of U.S. participation in the war and the changes in war technology, influenza reached military personnel at naval air stations at Wexford and Queenstown, Ireland, and in four French ports.[18] The navy also stated that an influenza pandemic “was evident” in Spain, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Great Britain.[19]
The First Wave in California: February–June 1918
Although the data lack narrative details, it is important to point out that the USPHS calculated a somewhat elevated or “excess” rate of mortality from influenza and pneumonia in early 1918 in fifty U.S. cities with a population over 100,000, including three in California: San Francisco from February through June; Los Angeles from March through May; and Oakland (located across the bay from San Francisco) from March through April.[20] These were not classified as outbreaks but are noteworthy because the disease was evident.
By April 1918, seven known first-wave influenza outbreaks occurred in separate locations throughout the state. Military physicians attributed three—in San Pedro, San Diego, and Linda Vista—to the arrival of two Japanese training cruisers, the Asama and the Iwate, with a thousand sailors, commanded by Vice Admiral Kantarō Suzuki. The ships docked in San Francisco on March 22 as part of a goodwill tour among allies. During World War I, Japan was allied with the United States, France, and Britain. California military and civilian dignitaries welcomed and socialized with Japanese officials at receptions and dinners. The Japanese cadets toured the Bay Area and attended athletic and cultural events where they mixed with the general public. The cruisers left San Francisco on March 29 and sailed south along the California coast.[21]
The Iwate and Asama docked at Los Angeles harbor on Monday, April 1. On Thursday, April 4, the Chambers of Commerce of San Pedro and Long Beach entertained a hundred officers and midshipmen at a banquet ashore. The next afternoon, Vice Admiral Suzuki welcomed these same officials plus delegates from the mayor’s office, and their wives, to afternoon teas held aboard both cruisers. Four hundred people attended.[22] The Japanese then sailed to San Diego. On April 9, the army training center, Camp Kearny, located in Linda Vista, north of San Diego, held a “Grand Review” in honor of “the Allied Countries.” Admiral Suzuki attended, along with representatives from the French and British militaries.[23]
On April 9, 1918, Camp Kearny (near San Diego, California) held a “Grand Review” for “the Allied Countries.” That April, 560 soldiers at the training camp became ill with influenza. Courtesy Library of Congress
Following the ships’ visit to Los Angeles, medical officers at the submarine base in San Pedro recorded 120 cases in an outbreak of ten days’ duration that April. The connection was clear to the navy’s surgeon general, who in 1919 reported that the outbreak followed the visit of a Japanese ship “on board which the disease was prevalent.”[24] Soon after the Iwate and Asama departed San Diego, the medical officers at the U.S. Naval Training Camp reported that 410 sailors, or 9 percent of the base complement, were infected with influenza. The origin of this outbreak, too, was obvious to navy doctors: it came “following the visit of a Japanese Squadron.” Pneumonia complicated twelve cases.[25] Camp Kearny’s medical officer—responsible for 560 infected soldiers—also linked the arrival of Japanese ships carrying influenza-infected sailors to his camp’s outbreak.[26]
Four additional first-wave influenza cases, of unknown origin, appeared in California in April 1918—on Mare Island, at Camp Fremont, at Stanford University, and in the state prison at San Quentin. In the April outbreak at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, located on a peninsula across the Napa River from the town of Vallejo, 450 sailors or “two-thirds of the ship’s company” aboard the battleship U.S.S. Oregon became infected with the influenza virus. One sailor, Harry McKinley Johnson, a musician first class in the U.S. Navy Reserves, died on April 12.[27]
South of San Francisco, U.S. Army medical officers at Camp Fremont, located in Menlo Park, reported another first-wave attack. Camp Fremont hospitalized 1,045 men as officers moved quickly to prevent the spread of the disease. They prohibited indoor assemblies and improved camp sanitation, including disinfecting affected patients’ tents and clothing. The surgeon sprayed the men’s noses and throats with an antiseptic, but these methods proved ineffective. Nineteen men died.[28] In addition, at Stanford University, immediately adjacent to Camp Fremont, administrators counted 260 influenza cases. Patients were isolated and hospitalized, but six died.[29]
North of San Francisco, another first-wave incident occurred in April 1918, in the California state prison at San Quentin. Dr. L. L. Stanley, the resident public health officer at the prison, carefully noted its first influenza infection on April 13. Stanley attributed the arrival of the disease to “the entrance into the institution of a [sick] prisoner who had come from the county jail in Los Angeles, where, he stated, a number of other inmates had been ill.”[30] From April 14 until May 26, Stanley treated “an epidemic of unusual severity” at San Quentin, with 101 patients hospitalized. Seven of these developed bronchopneumonia and three died. He noted that prisoners became ill within two to three days of contact with an infected prisoner. Stanley tracked the course of the disease, which peaked on April 23–24. At least 1,450 people, over 76 percent of the institution’s 1,900 prisoners, reported sick at the height of the outbreak.[31]
The Second Wave in California Naval Stations and Army Camps: August–December 1918
Influenza spread quickly throughout U.S. ships and military installations at home and overseas. Between June 1917 and November 1918, the United States trained nearly two million men and then shipped them overseas. Accompanying those men were at least 15,000 women from the navy, army, American Red Cross (ARC), and private agencies, who served as physicians, nurses, physical and occupational therapists, reconstruction aides, switchboard operators, casualty searchers, and clerks.[32] Late in August 1918, navy doctors observed that a second, more severe wave had evolved: “The type of cases changed; the disease began to spread progressively from one community to another. The percentage of pulmonary complications increased beyond comparison with regard to the earlier epidemics, and influenzal pneumonia frequently began very early in the disease.”[33]
According to the navy’s surgeon general, “in the United States, the first cases of this phase of the pandemic” were recognized on August 27 aboard a ship that housed new recruits at Commonwealth Pier in Boston.[34] The navy transferred those patients to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Starting with three cases, fifty-eight were ill only two days later, on August 29.[35] The navy reported that “epidemics of like character occurred almost simultaneously in most parts of the world.”[36] As scholars now know, this was the beginning of a second, even more severe wave of the pandemic. According to the scientists David M. Morens and Anthony S. Fauci, the “identit[ies] of viruses during [the] first and third waves are not known.” However, recent research indicates that “at least 2 virus variants [emerged and spread] during the second wave.”[37]
With the onset of the more fatal second wave of influenza in California, 5,188 soldiers became ill and 129 died at Camp Kearny in Linda Vista, near San Diego, from September 24 to December 8, 1918. Unfortunately, officials were slow to respond. Fourteen days after the first case was reported, camp leaders closed all indoor post exchanges (retail operations) and amusement halls. On October 9, they quarantined the camp. New arrivals were detained for five days and examined daily for signs of infection. For ten days—November 2 to 12—authorities ordered everyone in the camp to wear gauze masks. At the 1,280-bed hospital, dishes were boiled, linens were sterilized, and screens were placed between the cots. The camp then established a separate convalescent area for soldiers discharged from the hospital.[38]
The disease also recurred in fall 1918 at the U.S. Naval Training Camp at San Diego, which trained, housed, and fed an average of 4,932 personnel. New infections peaked between September 8 and 30. The final tally was 628 cases with nineteen fatalities for the period from September 21 to December 14.[39]
When the second wave attacked Camp Fremont in Menlo Park, medical officers improved upon their first-wave response in April by quickly closing theaters and post exchanges and canceling YMCA meetings and all assemblies, except for drill formations. Medical staff wore masks, and patients were assigned separate cubicles. Despite these heightened efforts, from October 8 to November 7, doctors treated 2,778 soldiers for influenza and pneumonia; 149 died.[40]
Captain Harry George, USN, and staff, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California, February 1, 1919. When an influenza outbreak started on Mare Island in September 1918, Captain George instituted a modified quarantine. Navy corpsmen, in cooperation with Dominican nuns, took care of influenza patients in the nearby town of Vallejo. Photograph NH 119808.
On September 24, 1918, Captain Harry George, the commandant at Mare Island, ordered precautions “in anticipation of an epidemic of influenza”.[41] With 7,657 navy personnel assigned to the yard, Mare Island was unusually permeable to infection. Between 8,000 to 10,000 civilians entered the shipyard daily, most of whom lived in Vallejo and the surrounding towns, typically in overcrowded, unsanitary rooming houses.[42] Additionally, with the nation at war, the navy routinely sent new recruits and draftees to Mare Island to be trained and assigned to ships. Under these circumstances, George believed, an absolute quarantine was unfeasible. He called instead for a modified quarantine and instructed all personnel to take precautions.[43] George ordered new recruits into detention for twenty-one days. Officials redesigned the sailors’ and marines’ sleeping quarters and allocated each man a sleeping area of fifty square feet within the barracks. Curtains hung between the bunks, cots, and hammocks formed cubicles that offered a measure of isolation. George closed on-base theaters (both live performances and “moving pictures”), recreation and reading rooms, classrooms, and churches. The commandant ordered strict isolation for influenza patients. Medical personnel were ordered to wear gowns and face masks, and to disinfect their hands after treating patients. Additional sanitary measures included steam-cleaning clothing and boiling all eating utensils and mess gear in dishwashing machines for at least five minutes.[44]
Despite these efforts, by the end of November 1918, physicians treated 1,536 navy personnel during the second wave. To supplement the permanent, 200-bed Navy hospital, workers at Mare Island constructed thirteen hospital buildings with 550 beds. When this proved inadequate, medical staff set up emergency tents to care for the additional sick during the peak period in October and requested additional nurses and medical officers.[45]
As the second wave overwhelmed navy physicians and corpsmen on Mare Island, civilians in the nearby town of Vallejo turned to the navy for help. In moves that would be familiar during the COVID-19 pandemic, the navy prohibited sailors and marines from leaving the shipyard and urged civic leaders to close their public buildings. To reduce contact between churchgoers, the navy encouraged congregations to hold services out of doors. From November 3 to 30, 1918, Navy corpsmen operated an emergency hospital for civilian employees on the grounds of the navy shipyard, caring for 287 patients. As the crisis worsened and Vallejo city officials were unable to manage, a local order of Dominican nuns temporarily lent the navy its new school building for a hospital, which patients quickly named “St. Vincent’s Navy Hospital.” Beginning on November 2, the nuns served as nurses alongside four navy physicians, twenty-four corpsmen, and fifty-eight support personnel. This hospital also remained open until November 30, ultimately caring for 190 patients.[46]
Naval Training Station, San Francisco, California (Yerba Buena Island). View looking southward over the wharf area, from the eastern end of Yerba Buena, 1921. The isolated position of the training station allowed the commandant to quarantine all military personnel from September 23 to November 21, 1918, keeping the station free from influenza. Photograph NH 100361. Courtesy of U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command
At San Francisco’s U.S. Naval Training Station, located on Yerba Buena Island, a different story unfolded. On September 23, the commandant imposed an absolute quarantine, recalling all officers, enlisted men, and civilians to base and requiring them to remain on the island. In the barracks, a muslin screen extended around the head and along the side of each man’s cot. The navy implemented what, in 2019–2020, would be called “social distancing”: the station curtailed all contact with San Francisco and Oakland except to collect supplies and welcome recruits and those who “necessarily had to be received.” The navy restricted the actions of tugboat crews and ordered them to stay twenty feet away from people on the dock. Passengers donned gauze face masks before boarding tugboats bound for the island.
Yerba Buena doctors administered then-standard measures designed to prevent contagious disease transmissions. The navy’s surgeon general, for example, reported that anyone arriving from the mainland had his “pharynx and nasal passages thoroughly sprayed with a 10 per cent solution of Silvol,” a solution of silver in water.[47] Parke, Davis & Company, makers of the product, touted it as an antiseptic and germicidal effective in combating infection.[48] Newcomers to Yerba Buena entered a quarantine camp for several days, where they continued to wear masks, received three daily treatments of Silvol spray, and kept a distance of twenty feet from each other.[49] Outside the quarantine camp, everyone on the station had his pharynx and nasal passages sprayed once daily with the same solution. Drinking fountains were “flamed with a gasoline torch, and all telephone transmitters were disinfected twice daily.”[50] The medical staff inoculated everyone on the island with three successive doses of “a mixed bacterial vaccine” on October 12, 15, and 18.[51]
Naval Training Station, San Francisco, California (Yerba Buena Island), ca. November 1918. Once the navy lifted its initial quarantine, over 100 sailors became ill. The navy improvised crowded arrangements on the Drill Hall floor, Main Barracks. The bunks were arranged in columns, with patients placed head to foot by row. Photograph NH 2654. Courtesy U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command
At the time, the navy’s surgeon general recognized that “this was not a pure quarantine experiment.” Yet as long as the quarantine remained in effect, the island remained free of infection. When the station resumed open contact with San Francisco and Oakland on November 21, the pandemic’s second wave battered Yerba Buena. On December 6, sixteen days after the navy lifted the quarantine, the medical officer reported the island’s first influenza case. During December, the navy counted 148 cases of acute bronchitis, thirteen of bronchopneumonia, four of lobar pneumonia, and twenty-five of influenza on Yerba Buena. Three men died of “influenza (influenzal pneumonia)” and two men died of pneumonia.[52] As the photographs illustrate, medical staff gradually obtained the cloth material to keep infected patients isolated from each other on the Drill Hall floor of the Main Barracks.
Naval Training Station, San Francisco (Yerba Buena Island), ca. December 1918. The navy erected sneeze screens between patients on the Drill Hall floor, Main Barracks. Sign on wall at left reads: “DO NOT SPIT ON THE FLOOR[,] TO DO SO MAY SPREAD DISEASE.” Photograph NH 41871. Courtesy of the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command
The Second Wave in California Communities: August–December 1918
California newspaper coverage of what would become the most severe influenza wave began haltingly. Only a few California papers reported on the presence of the second wave of influenza in August and September 1918. On August 31, the Sacramento public health officer advised “Sacramento girls” to cover their kisses with a handkerchief to avoid spreading influenza, “which has gained quite a footing in the cities in the East.”[53] On September 25, one news item announced an unknown number of cases on a coast steamer arriving at Los Angeles from San Francisco, twelve cases in Laverne, near Los Angeles, and an unknown number of cases in San Luis Obispo County. However, Dr. Kellogg, the CSBH’s executive officer, did not think these accounts were genuine.[54] He soon learned otherwise. Californians were somewhat oblivious to, and unprepared for, the second wave of a deadly disease.
As explained above, the USPHS did not declare “influenza” as a reportable disease until the last week in September 1918, when it required public health officers nationwide to send in weekly reports by telegram. Immediately after receiving orders from the USPHS, Kellogg contacted all public health officials in the state on September 27 and requested their compliance with official policy. Recognizing the severity of the disease and its threat to public health, Kellogg advised his fellow physicians that “the disease in the present pandemic seems to exhibit an unusual virulence, and is extremely prone to pneumonic complications.”[55] By the time the federal and state notices arrived in local communities, citizens in twenty-seven states, including California, had suffered from the more severe second wave of influenza.[56]
Just as crowded World War I military transports, stations, and camps—and the military’s interaction with local communities—clearly served as breeding grounds for the transmission of influenza, other vectors spread the disease. In California, these included railroad travel, railroad and highway construction camps, and steamship and ferry travel, as individuals moved up and down the coast and around the bays. Dunsmuir, a community near the Oregon border with approximately two thousand residents, was the site of a sizable Southern Pacific Railroad roundhouse used to service and turn its passenger and freight trains. By October 5, Dunsmuir’s first case, reported on September 21, 1918, had multiplied: 109 railroad workers and townspeople were sick.[57]
Southern Pacific Railroad, Dunsmuir, California, Roundhouse, ca 1910. Railroads and railroad towns served as vectors for the transmission of influenza. Dunsmuir, population approximately 2,000, was located near the Oregon border on the main rail line to the Pacific Northwest. By October 5, 1918, 109 railroad workers and townspeople were ill with influenza. Courtesy Northeastern California Historical Photograph Collection, Meriam Library, California State University, Chico
On October 1, 1918, federal authorities acknowledged the rapid spread of the second wave of influenza throughout the nation. Congress responded by appropriating $1 million ($16 million in 2020 dollars) to enable the USPHS and local boards of health to combat and suppress the influenza pandemic. Congress advised the army, navy, and USPHS to work together to fight the virus.[58] After urging local health authorities to report influenza cases, the surgeon general of the USPHS, Rupert Blue, organized a nationwide campaign warning people of the dangers of the disease, and designated the states’ chief health officers to direct doctors and nurses to serve in areas with high morbidity and mortality.[59]
“To Avoid Influenza, Wear a Mask.” California State Board of Health and Wilfred H. Kellogg, M.D. Influenza: A Study of Measures Adopted for the Control of the Epidemic, Special Bulletin No. 31 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1919), 16.
By October 12, 1918, the USPHS, with the aid of the ARC, had organized a volunteer medical corps. Eighty-eight California communities requested assistance, and 180 California nurses and sixty physicians offered their help. Kellogg clarified “simple isolation” to mean that sick patients should remain in a private room within their homes, and he confirmed that local health officials had the authority to impose a ten-day “detention period.” He ordered doctors, nurses, patients, family members, and those with a cold to wear gauze face masks; and he recommended that barbers, dentists, druggists, and “many others” wear them as a public duty. Newspapers published the CSBH’s instructions for making, cleaning, and disposing of masks, along with guidelines called “What To Do Until the Doctor Comes”. These included staying in bed, keeping warm, and eating nourishing food, such as plain milk, egg and milk, or broth, every four hours. The CSBH reminded people to avoid crowded places and sick people, to walk to work rather than ride public conveyances, to wash hands before eating, and to spend time outdoors in the sunshine.[60] The USPHS distributed over six million pamphlets informing citizens about the perils of the highly contagious virus and circulated posters throughout the country explaining how influenza was transmitted and what precautions to take.[61]
“Influenza Spread by Droplets Sprayed from Nose and Throat,” Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Treasury. Courtesy U.S. National Library of Medicine, Digital Collections, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
And still Californians kept dying of influenza, with complications from pneumonia. By the end of October, California reported 124,167 cases of influenza and pneumonia, and the number of deaths had climbed to 5,381. These comprised 3,541 males (or 65.8 percent of fatalities) and 1,840 females (34.2 percent). Nearly two-thirds (64.6 percent) of those who died were between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine. The CSBH also noted the racial characteristics of the October deaths: 5,080 were whites (listed as “Caucasians”); 162 Japanese; 57 Negroes (sic); 46 Chinese; and 36 Indians.[62]
California’s two major cities—Los Angeles and San Francisco—responded to the pandemic threat differently. L.A. authorities acted quickly to combat the virus. Their precautions were wise, given the city’s rapidly growing population, which ballooned from 319,198 in 1910 to 576,673 in 1920.[63] Los Angeles counted seven new cases on September 21.[64] Later scholars would identify fifty-five Polytechnic High School students as among the city’s earliest suspected cases.[65] Recognizing the threat to public health, the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Luther Milton Powers, conferred with the mayor, Frederic Thomas Woodman. On October 11, the mayor declared a state of emergency. Taking actions that would be repeated throughout California during March 2020 in the COVID-19 pandemic, the L.A. City Council passed an ordinance closing public gathering places. Citizens who failed to comply could receive a misdemeanor conviction, six months in jail, and a $500 fine ($8,083 in 2020 dollars).[66] The city closed schools, amusement parks, theaters, movie houses, dance halls, concert venues, exhibitions, and religious services. The county health officer ordered schools closed in a dozen nearby communities. City officials canceled two major World War I–era pathways for transmission of the virus: a parade and a Liberty Loan bond fundraiser. Even though Herbert Hoover, head of the U.S. Food Administration, had designated the film industry as “official purveyors” of publicity for his agency, producers and actors agreed to temporarily halt film production, including filming crowd scenes. L.A. officials also organized several hospitals.[67]
Not everyone agreed with the city’s measures. Residents objected to the conversion of Mount Washington Hotel into a convalescent hospital for influenza patients and to the city spending $10,500 ($169,754 in 2020 dollars) to do so.[68] On December 4, the L.A. City Council voted to lift the ban on public gatherings, even though second-wave infection rates confirmed that the contagion continued to spread. By mid-December, a reported 38,382 people were ill.[69]
Community leaders in San Francisco resisted implementing the kinds of draconian measures undertaken in L.A. San Francisco’s population had grown more slowly than that of Los Angeles, with 416,912 residents in 1910 and 506,676 in 1920. Yet the city experienced a higher proportion of influenza morbidity and mortality than its neighbor to the south. The death rates from influenza and pneumonia in the United States overall, in California, and in L.A., San Francisco, and Oakland are summarized in Table 2.[70]
San Francisco Police Court officials hold a session in the open as a precaution against spreading influenza, 1918. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration
On October 17, 1918, with 21,000 diagnosed influenza cases, a group in San Francisco—including the mayor, James Rolph; city health officer William C. Hassler, MD; and representatives from the USPHS, the ARC, and the military—met to discuss ways to contain the pandemic. The city’s Board of Health closed schools and public amusements, canceled dances and lodge meetings, and prohibited social gatherings. However, it allowed a Liberty Loan bond drive and parade to take place. Officials recommended that church gatherings be held outside. Some city services met outside, such as Police Court. On October 18, Hassler recommended that citizens wear gauze face masks. The following week, despite loud public protest, the city passed an ordinance mandating masks in public or when two or more people were together.[71] ARC volunteers made and distributed 100,000 gauze masks by October 25.[72] The next day, the ARC quickly started converting the Civic Center into a hospital for three hundred influenza patients and appealed for more nurses to care for the sick.[73] Also during October, some San Francisco women learned to drive cars to help physicians and patients; and, just as people in the United States would someday use technology at home for school, work, and socializing during the COVID-19 pandemic, in October 1918 the telephone company installed more phones, a relative novelty, in households with influenza sufferers.[74] By November 2, firemen volunteered to assist the coroner as deaths increased.[75] Due to the generosity of its supporters, the San Francisco chapter of the ARC spent $100,000 ($1.5 million in 2020 dollars) by mid-November to combat influenza in the city and provide relief for the needy.[76]
San Francisco lifted the ban on public gatherings in some parts of the city on November 16. Five days later, officials permitted residents to remove their face masks. On November 25, the city reopened schools, movie houses, theaters, and sports facilities, but the disease continued to spread.[77] According to California Public Health Department data, between October 5, 1918, and January 25, 1919, approximately 39,000 San Franciscans suffered from influenza and pneumonia; 3,600 died.[78] Chart 1 shows the death rates in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Stockton, and Sacramento during the second wave.[79]
In another example of the arrival of the epidemic’s second wave, the public health officer at San Quentin, Dr. Stanley, recorded that the prison’s autumn occurrence followed the October 3, 1918, entrance of a prisoner from Los Angeles whose guard was sick. The prisoner became ill the next day and was hospitalized, but not before exposing others (he had spent the preceding night in a receiving room with ten other men, and ate meals in the dining hall with an estimated 1,900 men).
To safeguard the prisoners’ health, Stanley closed the prison’s indoor “picture show” and invited the Oakland Municipal Band to perform an open-air concert on October 20. Influenza cases peaked the following day. For the next eleven days, Stanley took care of sixty-nine second-wave influenza patients; 8–12 percent of these developed pneumonia, and two died.[80] When Stanley submitted his final report on the outbreak to the USPHS, he concluded: “The most effective means available for combating the spread of the disease in this prison were hospitalization, quarantine, isolation, and the closure of congregating places.”[81] The conclusions reached by the San Quentin doctor are especially important in relation to COVID-19 because the state’s 2020 prison population of approximately 240,000 is difficult to protect.[82]
As scientists and historians now recognize, the influenza epidemic’s second wave struck California during the fall and early winter of 1918 and proved more lethal than the first wave. The new outbreak of infection both caused and revealed a shortage of physicians, nurses, and hospitals. In response, volunteer members of the state’s well-organized Women’s Committee of the Council of Defense shifted from war work to caring for influenza victims. Earlier in the year, the Women’s Committee had established twenty-two Children’s Health Centers statewide. Committee members used information from these centers to identify sick children and their families. Volunteers nursed the sick, obtained beds and bedding, and purchased medicines, fuel, and groceries and delivered them to the ill; they cooked meals for patients and even cleaned their homes. Members of the Women’s Committee set up a motor corps and located drivers to take patients to and from hospitals.[83]
The Third Wave in California: January–May 1919
At the beginning of the new year, Mrs. Bernard T. Miller of Oakland and her six children lay ill with influenza. Her husband, an army captain, was stationed in Virginia. On January 9, 1919, their youngest child, seventeen-month-old Robert, died from the disease.[84] The Oakland Tribune announced “137 New Flu Cases Here in 24 Hours,” with twelve deaths in the same period, including little Robert.[85] Oakland called for more volunteer ARC nurses to care for local cases.[86]
As the third wave of influenza struck, the city of Berkeley, adjacent to Oakland, still debated how to protect its residents. Amid the same kind of arguments that would echo across the United States in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Berkeley City Council failed to pass a mask ordinance despite the recommendations of Berkeley’s city health officer, Dr. J. J. Benton, and a University of California physician and professor of hygiene, Dr. Robert T. Legge. The city’s commissioner of public health and safety, Charles D. Heywood, a prominent businessman, opposed the ordinance.[87]
At the beginning of 1919, influenza cases and deaths increased in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In response, Los Angeles, in early January 1919, passed a series of strict quarantine measures, including ordering influenza patients to remain in their homes, and hired quarantine inspectors.[88] By the end of January 1919, the City of Los Angeles had spent all of the funds intended for the entire fiscal year: $247,000 ($3.8 million in 2020 dollars).[89] Later studies reveal that it was money well spent.[90]
In early January 1919, at the onset of the third wave, San Francisco pleaded for more ARC nurses to volunteer at San Francisco Hospital to care for influenza victims, and the mayor even requested help from the navy.[91] On January 19, San Francisco restored its mask ordinance and did not rescind it until February 1.[92] As the third wave continued to expand around the state, the California legislature allocated $55,000 ($840,000 in 2020 dollars) to enable the CSBH to control contagious diseases.[93]
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a total of 189,326 people died of influenza and pneumonia in 1919. In California, the total number of deaths from influenza and pneumonia for 1919 was 7,240.[94]
The third wave again led to cooperation between military and civilian populations. During the third wave, the naval training station on Yerba Buena reported 127 cases and seventeen deaths. Mare Island recorded 271 cases and nine deaths.[95] Civilians employed at the shipyard again asked the navy for help. In January 1919, the Dominican nuns reopened St. Vincent’s Hospital, where they cared for fifty-five patients, one of whom died. The hospital closed on January 28, shortly after Vallejo lifted the order shuttering public places.[96] It is clear that the second wave proved deadlier than the first and third, but a fourth wave, less deadly than the previous three, struck in 1920, as officials had warned (see Tables 1 and 2).
Children’s Ward, San Jose Convalescent Hospital during the influenza pandemic, 1918. Townspeople donated the beds, bedding, clothing for the patients, as well as flowers and toys. Courtesy of History San José
A Fourth Wave in California: January–March 1920
By the start of 1920, Californians were experienced influenza fighters. In San Francisco, as another wave of the pandemic struck, city officials once again called for ARC nurses to volunteer their services.[97] Long Beach and Los Angeles physicians did not request a ban on public gatherings or close schools, but they did call for preventive isolation.[98]
The U.S. Census Bureau provides evidence of a fourth wave of the pandemic in its analysis of 1920 mortality statistics: “An epidemic of considerable proportions marked the early months of 1920—an epidemic which caused 33 percent as many deaths as the great pandemic of 1918–1919.” In the United States, 182,205 people died from influenza and pneumonia in 1920, including 5,725 Californians.[99]
CONCLUSION
The 1918–1920 influenza pandemic alarmed everyone—physicians, scientists, public officials, the military, and citizens—with the rapidity of its spread, the severity of its effects, the extraordinary morbidity and mortality counts, and the insidious way that the disease lingered and flared up again. Ship movements during World War I transported influenza from port to port, nation to nation (just as, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic swept through aircraft carriers such as the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt and among crews and passengers of international cruise ships).[100] One hundred years ago, all efforts to produce a cure, a vaccine, or drugs to alleviate victims’ suffering failed. Although Congress appropriated money for the military and the USPHS, and the latter advertised the dangers of influenza extensively and helped coordinate physicians and nurses, most states and communities devised their own strategies for dealing with the crisis. Some responded more sensibly and effectively than others. Despite the staggering death rate—the most conservative estimate was 850,000 deaths in the United States—no national planning for future emergencies or a national health care plan emerged from the catastrophe.
The influenza pandemic began in the last year of a devastating world war that claimed at least ten million military lives (and twice that many wounded). The pandemic ended as the war’s survivors and refugees struggled to return home and rebuild their lives.[101] It took scientists more than seventy years to recover and reconstruct the 1918 pandemic virus and to begin decoding its genetic characteristics. Scientists continue to learn more about the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, though many questions remain unanswered.[102]
As the pandemic raged, especially by the onset of what we now know as the second wave, the military pioneered the most effective responses, leading the way in attempts to slow the rate of infection. Wherever possible, military leaders ordered absolute or modified quarantines, enlarged existing hospitals and built new ones, and demanded both better personal hygiene and improved sanitation of facilities. When quarantine orders were lifted too soon, rates of infection escalated. The quick and forthright decisions made by Los Angeles officials, in contrast to those in San Francisco, serve as instructive examples. Also instructive is the cooperation that developed between the U.S. Navy at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard and the Dominican nuns in Vallejo. The spirit of voluntarism displayed by members of the Women’s Committee of the California Council of Defense and the American Red Cross demonstrate how ordinary citizens rose to the challenge of caring for the sick in unprecedented numbers. As the world suffers today with the onslaught of COVID-19, we must look to the lessons of the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic.
Notes
[1] J. K. Taubenberger and D. M. Morens, “1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12, no. 1 (2006), http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-0979_article.htm#; M. van Wijke et al., “Loose Ends in the Epidemiology of the 1918 Pandemic: Explaining the Extreme Mortality Risk in Young Adults,” American Journal of Epidemiology 187 (2018): 2503–2510. The United States declared war against Germany on April 6, 1917. A more comprehensive article will appear in August 2020: Diane M. T. North, “California and the 1918-1920 Influenza Pandemic,” California History 97, no.3 (Summer 2020).
[2] Congressional Research Service, American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics, comp. Anne Leland and Mari-Jana Oboroceanu (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2010), 2. During U.S. involvement in World War I (1917–1918), a total 4,734,991 Americans served. Of the 116,516 total deaths, (including approximately 4,000 Californians), 53,402 were battle deaths and 63,114 deaths were listed as “Other,” mainly from influenza. Carol Byerly, “The U.S. Military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919,” Public Health Reports 125, Supplement 3 (2010): 83.
[3] J. A. B. Hammond, W. Rolland, and T. H. G. Shore, “Purulent Bronchitis: A Study of Cases Occurring amongst the British Troops at a Base in France,” Lancet 2 (1917): 41–45; Michael Worobey, Jim Cox, and Douglas Gill, “The Origins of the Great Pandemic,” Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health 2019 (January 21, 2019): 18–25; Mark Osborne Humphries, “Paths of Infection: The First World War and the Origins of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” War in History 21 (2014): 55–81.
[5] Niall P. A. S. Johnson and Juergen Mueller, “Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (2002): 105–115..
[6] U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Mortality Statistics 1918, Nineteenth Annual Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920) (hereafter cited as Mortality Statistics 1918): in the text, on page 27, the census bureau lists 477,467 deaths from influenza and pneumonia (all forms); however, on p. 30 in the unnumbered table, the census bureau lists 367,433 deaths. I selected the higher number for the totals. Bureau of Census, Mortality Statistics 1919, Twentieth Annual Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921) (hereafter cited as Mortality Statistics 1919): in the text, on page 28, the census bureau lists 189,326 deaths from influenza and pneumonia (all forms); however, on the unnumbered table on the same page, the census bureau lists 143,548 deaths. I selected the higher number for the totals. Bureau of Census, Mortality Statistics 1920, Twenty-First Annual Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922) (hereafter cited as Mortality Statistics 1920), 5, for percent of registration area; see 17 and 31 for 62,097 influenza deaths; see 51 for 120,108 pneumonia deaths (all forms) and the combined total of influenza and pneumonia (all forms): 182,205.
[7]Mortality Statistics 1918, 30: mortality for influenza and pneumonia (all forms), 16,773; Mortality Statistics 1919, 28: mortality for influenza and pneumonia (all forms), 7,240; Mortality Statistics 1920: 5,725 deaths; 314 (influenza: 2,185 deaths); 315 (pneumonia: 3,540 deaths).
[8] “Epidemic Influenza (‘Spanish Influenza’): Prevalence in the United States,” Public Health Reports 22, no. 29 (September 27, 1918): 1625–1626 (previously reportable diseases in the United States included smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, mumps, typhoid fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, poliomyelitis, chickenpox, meningitis, pellagra, and venereal diseases); California State Board of Health and Wilfred H. Kellogg, Influenza: A Study of the Measures Adopted for the Control of the Epidemic, Special Bulletin No. 31 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1919) (hereafter cited as Kellogg, Influenza: A Study of Measures), 26. In addition, not until 1930 did the USPHS publish a detailed study of the 1918–1920 excess mortality data. See Selwyn D. Collins, W. H. Frost, Mary Gover, and Edgar Sydenstricker, “Mortality from Influenza and Pneumonia in 50 Large Cities of the United States, 1910–1929,” Public Health Reports 45, no. 39 (September 26, 1930): 2277–2363.
[9] Howard Markel, Alexandra M. Stern, J. Alexander Navarro, and Joseph R. Michalsen, “A Historical Assessment of Nonpharmaceutical Disease Containment Strategies Employed by Selected U.S. Communities during the Second Wave of the 1918–1920 Influenza Pandemic” (Fort Belvoir, VA: Defense Threat Reduction Agency, January 31, 2006), 27–32; Johnson and Mueller, “Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic,” 107; Nancy K. Bristow, American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3; Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 203–204.
[10] For the March cases at Camp Funston, Fort Riley, Kansas, see “1918 Influenza Pandemic Historic Timeline,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (page last reviewed March 20, 2018), https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/pandemic-timeline-1918.htm (accessed March 26, 2020); Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, 18. For April 5, 1918, cases in Haskell, Kansas, see “1918 Influenza Pandemic Historic Timeline,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (page last reviewed March 20, 2018); https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/pandemic-timeline-1918.htm (accessed March 26, 2020). For March and April 1918, see Carol R. Byerly, Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army during World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 71. The army also reported influenza cases in March 1918 at training camps in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Oklahoma, but that information has been overlooked because of the emphasis on Kansas. U.S. Army, Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Army 1919, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), vol. 1, 784 (hereafter cited as Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Army 1919).
[11] U.S. Navy Department, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 367 (hereafter cited as Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919); U.S. Department of Navy, Naval Historical Center, “Casualties: U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Personnel Killed and Injured in Selected Accidents and Other Incidents Not Directly the Result of Enemy Action,” https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/NHC/accidents.htm (accessed March 18, 2020).
[12] Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 367.
[13] Richard Levitan, “The Infection That’s Silently Killing Coronavirus Patients,” New York Times, April 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/opinion/coronavirus-testing-pneumonia.html; John F. Brundage and G. Dennis Shanks, “Deaths from Bacterial Pneumonia during the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic, Emerging Infectious Diseases 14 (August 2008): 1193–1199.
[14]Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 367–368.
[20] Collins et al., “Mortality from Influenza and Pneumonia in 50 Large Cities of the United States, 1910–1929,” table A: “Excess Monthly Death Rates (annual basis) per 100,000 from Influenza and Pneumonia in Each of 50 Cities in the United States, 1910–1929”: Los Angeles, 2310; San Francisco, 2317; Oakland, 2313.
[21] San Francisco Examiner, “2 Japanese Training Ships Pay a Visit,” March 23, 1918, 6; San Francisco Examiner, “Japanese Training Ships Visit Port,” March 24, 1918, 3; San Francisco Examiner, “Consul to Entertain Japanese Officers,” March 25, 1918, 2; San Francisco Examiner, “S.F. Japanese Hold Big Field Day Show,” March 25, 1918, 8; Oakland Tribune, “Honor Japanese,” March 28, 1918, 4; San Francisco Examiner, “Japanese Admiral Tells Nippon Aims,” March 29, 4; Eric Lacroix and Linton Wells II, Japanese Cruisers of the Pacific War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997), 552, 657–658.
[22] Long Beach Daily Telegram, “Jap Training Ships in L. A. Harbor,” April 2, 1918, 9; Long Beach Press, “Japanese Guests Feted by Local Organizations,” April 5, 1918, 2; Long Beach Daily Telegram, “Jap Officers Return Courtesies,” April 6, 1918, 16.
[23]History of the Fortieth (Sunshine) Division, 1917–1919 (Los Angeles, CA: C.S. Hutson, 1920), 65; Bakersfield Morning Echo, “Kearny Division Men Reviewed by Allied Officers,” April 10, 1918, 10.
[24]Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 368.
[25]Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 368.
[26] U.S. Army, Medical Department, Office of Medical History, and Maj. Milton W. Hall, “Inflammatory Diseases of the Respiratory Tract,” in The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War, vol. 9: Communicable and Other Diseases (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1928), 133 (hereafter cited as Communicable and Other Diseases).
[27]Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 367–368 (The medical officer did not list a possible source for the disease.); “Died of Accident or Other Causes, Including Camp Deaths,” Yolo in Word & Picture (Woodland, CA: Woodland Daily Democrat, 1920), 10; “Harry McKinley Johnson,” Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/125036704/harry-mckinley-johnson (accessed March 25, 2020). See also Diane M. T. North, California at War: The State and the People during World War I (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 29–66, 109–177.
[28]Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Army 1919, vol. 1, 784.
[32] Frank M. McMurry, The Geography of the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 31; North, California at War: The State and the People during World War I, 43–46, 81–105.
[33] Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 370. See also David M. Morens, Jeffery K. Taubenberger, and Anthony S. Fauci, “Predominant Role of Bacterial Pneumonia as a Cause of Death in Pandemic Influenza: Implications for Pandemic Influenza Preparedness,” Journal of Infectious Diseases 198 (October 1, 2008): 962–970.
[34] Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 370.
[37] Morens and Fauci, “The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Insights for the 21st Century,” 1019.
[38] Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Army 1919, vol. 1, 746, 634 (table 304); Communicable and Other Diseases, 138.
[39] Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 372, 374 (table 1), 375, (table 3), 376 (table 4). The medical officer speculated that the intense nature of the disease in the spring modified its course in the autumn.
[41]Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 429; see 445–446 for “Commandant’s Order No. 386, Mare Island, Cal., September 24, 1918.”
[42] Capt. Thomas L. Snyder, MC, USNR, “The Great Flu Crisis at Mare Island Navy Yard, and Vallejo, California,” Navy Medicine 94, no. 5 (September–October 2003), 26.
[43] Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 445.
[45] Snyder, “The Great Flu Crisis at Mare Island Navy Yard, and Vallejo, California,” 26; Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 35.
[46] Snyder, “The Great Flu Crisis at Mare Island Navy Yard, and Vallejo, California, ”27–28; San Francisco Examiner, “Vallejo Asks Navy Aid with 1,000 Flu Cases,” October 31, 1918, 13; “Receipts of the Secretary General’s Office,” Catholic Education Association Bulletin 16 (November 1919), 26, mentions the Dominican sisters in Vallejo.
[47] Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 428.
[52]Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1919, 429. The “first wave” of the pandemic appears to have missed Yerba Buena.
[53] The Sacramento story was reported in the Santa Barbara Daily News and Independent, “If You Must, Use a Kerchief,” August 31, 1918, 2.
[54]Sacramento Bee, “Spanish Influenza Spreading in South,” September 25, 1918, 5. Because Spain witnessed well-published high morbidity and mortality cases during the first wave of 1918, the disease earned the popular name “Spanish Influenza” or “Spanish Flu.”
[55] “Epidemic Influenza (‘Spanish Influenza’): Prevalence in the United States,” Public Health Reports 22, no. 29 (September 27, 1918): 1625–1626; Kellogg, Influenza: A Study of Measures, 26.
[56] “Epidemic Influenza (‘Spanish Influenza’): Prevalence in the United States,” 1625–1626, 1644.
[57] California State Board of Health, Monthly Bulletin 14, no. 7 (January 1919): 226; Jessica Skropanic, “Bon Voyage: Make Tracks to California Train Stations, Part Three,” Record Searchlight, June 19, 2014, http://archive.redding.com/lifestyle/bon-voyage-make-tracks-to-california-train-stations-part-three-ep-375171960-354445101.html; Richard J. Orsi, “Railroads and the Urban Environment: Sacramento’s Story,” in Christopher J. Castaneda and Lee M. A. Simpson (eds.), River City and Valley Life: An Environmental History of the Sacramento Region (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 89–90.
[58] Public Resolution, No. 42, U.S. Statutes at Large 40, Ch. 179 (October 1, 1918): 1008; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “CPI Inflation Calculator,” http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm (accessed May 1, 2020; hereafter cited as “CPI Inflation Calculator”).
[60] California State Board of Health, Monthly Bulletin 14, no. 7 (January 1919): 221, 226; Kellogg, Influenza: A Study of Measures, 16–18, 26; San Francisco Examiner, “State Doctors Are Mobilized,” October 11, 1918, 4; Sacramento Bee, “Everyone with a Cold Must Wear a Mask,” October 22, 1918, 1.
[61] Gernhart, “A Forgotten Enemy: PHS’s Fight against the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” 560.
[62] California State Board of Health, Monthly Bulletin 14, nos. 5 and 6 (November–December 1918): for October morbidity, see 173; for September and October mortality and other data, 189.
[63] U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Thirteenth Census 1910, vol. 2: Population (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 157; and Fourteenth Census 1920, vol. 1: Population, detailed tables (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 95–96 (table 49); 151 (table 50); 183–185 (table 51).
[64] “Epidemic Influenza: Prevalence in the United States,” 1688. The USPHS noted seven influenza cases in the city of Los Angeles by September 21.
[65] “Los Angeles, California,” in The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918–1919, A Digital Encyclopedia, ed. J. Alex Navarro and Howard Markel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine and Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2016) (hereafter cited as “Los Angeles, California”), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/flu/cities/city-losangeles.html (accessed March 30, 2020).
[71] W. H. Frost, “The Epidemiology of Influenza, 1919, with a commentary by Thomas M. Daniel, Public Health Reports 121, Supplement 1 (2006): 148–159 (Frost’s study was first published in 1919); “San Francisco, California,” in The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918–1919: A Digital Encyclopedia (herefter cited as “San Francisco, California”), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/flu/cities/city-sanfrancisco.html (accessed March 28, 2020).
[72]San Francisco Chronicle, “Red Cross Gives Out 100,000 Gauze Masks,” October 25, 1918, 7.
[73]San Francisco Chronicle, “Red Cross Rushes Quarters at Civic Center for Use as Hospital to Fight Influenza,” October 26, 1918, 1.
[74]San Francisco Examiner, “Women Drive Cars to Aid Doctors,” October 25, 1918, 7; San Francisco Chronicle, “Phones Added for Influenza Sufferers,” October 23, 1918, 1.
[75]San Francisco Chronicle, “Firemen Volunteer to Assist Coroner,” November 2, 1918, 1.
[76]San Francisco Examiner, “$100,000 Spent to Fight ‘Flu,’ ” November 21, 1918, 11; “CPI Inflation Calculator.”
[78] Arseny K. Hrenoff, “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918–1919 in San Francisco,” Military Surgeon 89 (November 1941): 807, table 1A: 2,257 died from October through December 1918 and 1,379 died in the first two months of 1919.
[83] California State Council of Defense, Report, Women’s Committee of the State Council of Defense of California from June 1, 1917 to January 1, 1919 (Los Angeles, 1919), 36.
[84] Oakland Tribune, “Flu Takes Baby as Six Others Improve,” January 10, 1919, 3.
[85]Oakland Tribune, “137 New Flu Cases Here in 24 Hours,” January 10, 1919, 3.
[90] Howard Markel, Harvey B. Lipman, J. A. Navarro, Alexandra Sloan, Joseph R. Michalsen, Alexandra M. Stern, and Martin S. Cetron, “Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Implemented by US Cities during the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic,” Journal of the American Medical Association 298 (August 8, 2007): 644–654.
[91]San Francisco Examiner, “Need of Nurses at S. F. Hospital Declared Vital,” January 3, 1919, 5; San Francisco Examiner, “Rolph Calls for Navy Nurses,” January 4, 1919, 5.
[93] California, The Statutes of California and Amendments to the Codes, 43rd session, 1919 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1919), 838: Chapter 449, May 22, 1919; “CPI Inflation Calculator.”
[94]Mortality Statistics 1919, 28. The government’s data for separate influenza and pneumonia numbers for the entire United States contain inconsistencies in the tables in relation to the overall number of mortalities explained in the text. For California cities, by type of disease, see 200 for influenza and 201 for pneumonia (Los Angeles: 637 influenza deaths and 418 pneumonia deaths; Oakland: 234 influenza deaths and 273 pneumonia deaths; San Francisco: 763 influenza deaths and 659 pneumonia deaths).
[95] U.S. Navy, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1920 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), 206 (hereafter cited as Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Navy 1920), 206.
[96] Snyder, “The Great Flu Crisis at Mare Island Navy Yard, and Vallejo, California,” 28.
[97]San Francisco Examiner, “City to Join State Board in ‘Flu’ War,” January 30, 1920, 3.
[98]Long Beach Press, “Influenza as Epidemic to Be Met by Isolation,” January 27, 1920, 9; Long Beach Press, “Same Measures in Los Angeles as Long Beach,” January 27, 1920, 9.
[101] Antoine Prost, “The Dead,” in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3: Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 587–591. The exact numbers for civilian casualties are unknown; conservative estimates suggest ten million.
[102] Douglas Jordan, Terrence Tumpey, and Barbara Jester, “The Deadliest Flu: The Complete Story of the Discovery and Reconstruction of the 1918 Pandemic Virus,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (page last reviewed Dec. 17, 2019), https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html (accessed March 18, 2020); Jeffrey K. Taubenberger, Ann H. Reid, Karen E. Bijwaard, and Thomas G. Fanning, “Initial Genetic Characterization of the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Virus,” Science 275 (March 21, 1997): 1793–1796; Jeffrey K. Taubenberger, David Baltimore, Peter C. Doherty, Howard Markel, David M. Morens, Robert G. Webster, and Ian A. Wilson, “Reconstruction of the 1918 Influenza Virus: Unexpected Rewards from the Past,” mBio 3, no. 5 (September–October 2012): 1–5, https://mbio.asm.org/content/mbio/3/5/e00201-12.full.pdf; John S. Oxford and Douglas Gill, “Unanswered Questions about the 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Origin, Pathology, and the Virus Itself,” Lancet Infectious Diseases 8, no. 11 (published online, June 20, 2018), https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/laninf/PIIS1473-3099(18)30359-1.pdf.
Where the monument once stood, only a gentle divot in the earth remains. Visitors to Hollywood Forever Cemetery today could easily pass over the spot without realizing that, for the better part a century, this quiet corner of Los Angeles housed a six-foot granite tribute to the dead soldiers of the Confederacy. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) erected the monument in 1925 to honor their rebel ancestors, buried in the surrounding cemetery plot. It was the first of its kind anywhere in the Far West. And it remained the most significant Confederate marker in California until it was removed from the cemetery grounds in the wake of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. That rally—which began with a tiki-torch-lit vigil around a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and ended in the murder of one of the counterprotesters—sparked a national backlash against Confederate iconography and the history it represents.[1] In the weeks that followed, numerous Confederate monuments across the country came down. If only fleetingly, California played an important part in this reckoning with Civil War memory and the legacies of American slavery.
The Hollywood memorial was not the only one of its kind in California. In fact, no other state beyond the South contained as many monuments, markers, and place-names honoring the Confederate States of America (1861–1865) and its soldiers.[2] In addition to the Hollywood Forever memorial, Californians paid homage to the Confederacy with a large granite pillar in Orange County’s Santa Ana Cemetery; schools in San Diego and Long Beach named for Robert E. Lee; the township of Confederate Corners in Monterey County; mountaintops in the Sierra Nevada range commemorating Confederate president Jefferson Davis and General George E. Picket; the Robert E. Lee redwood in Kings Canyon National Park, plus three other large trees that bear the rebel general’s name; a scenic network of rock formations near Lone Pine named for the CSS Alabama, one of the Confederacy’s most feared warships; a small monument to Robert S. Garnett, the first rebel general killed in the Civil War; and five markers to the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway.[3] Many of the monuments were removed or renamed following events in Charlottesville. But for much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, they stood as totems to the slave South in the American West.
Why did a free state, far beyond the major military theaters of the Civil War, host such a collection of rebel monuments and memorials? The answer lies partly in the Golden State’s long-standing affinity for the Old South. That transregional relationship dates back much further than 1925, when the first of these monuments appeared in California. Although admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850 and populated primarily by migrants from northern states and territories, California was coopted by southern-born politicians. They occupied a majority of California’s high offices and steered the state along a conspicuously proslavery path in the final decade before the Civil War. Many of these leaders faded from the scene after slave emancipation in 1865. But those who replaced them nurtured a nostalgia for the plantation South and hostility toward the progressive, Republican policies of Reconstruction. Due to their efforts, California became the only free state that refused to ratify both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution—the measures that, respectively, extended citizenship rights to most natural-born Americans and granted suffrage to black men.[4]
In the coming decades, thousands of migrants from the former Confederate states arrived in California, strengthening the bonds between South and West. Although they represented a dwindling proportion of the state’s overall population, these migrants wielded an outsized cultural influence in the West.[5] By the turn of the century, they had formed numerous chapters of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the UDC. As California’s Union veterans and their ancestors celebrated the preservation of the United States, these Confederate memorial associations crafted an alternate memory of the conflict. Through various commemorative activities, they advanced a revisionist interpretation of the Civil War known as the “Lost Cause.”
The Lost Cause is almost as old as the Civil War itself. The Southern partisan Edward Pollard laid out some of its major themes in his 1866 work of the same name.[6] Over the coming decades, writers, orators, artists, filmmakers, and memorial associations would build upon the major themes of the Lost Cause, as they sought to craft a sympathetic public memory of the war and imbue their rebellion with romance and dignity. Each Lost Cause warrior celebrated a slightly different aspect of the Confederate past but, over time, most came to embrace a common set of arguments. They denied the central role of slavery in triggering secession; they blamed the war on abolitionists in the North, rather than fire-eaters in the South; they exalted the gallantry of the common Confederate soldier and the virtues of their commanders; they dismissed the Union victory as a nearly inevitable consequence of superior numbers and resources; and they looked back nostalgically on the era of plantation slavery. The Lost Cause lives on in hundreds of Confederate markers and memorials across the country.[7]
Despite a vast literature on the origins, evolution, and enduring influence of the Lost Cause, little has been written on how this ideology impacted the political culture and physical space of the American West.[8] Historians have ably described California’s proslavery origins as well as its postwar record of white supremacy.[9] But how those politics played out through a decades-long struggle over historical memory within the state is only dimly understood. By surveying the Confederate landscape of California, this essay attempts to address that historical lacuna. As an introduction to the subject, rather than a detailed analysis of the Lost Cause in the American West, it also suggests avenues for further research. Hidden in plain sight for generations, the Confederate memorials of California have an important history to tell. Together, they testify to the continental reach of the Lost Cause.
The contest over Civil War memory and the Western landscape was always that—a contest. To carry the Lost Cause into California required enormous effort and organization from dozens of Confederate memorial associations. Monuments, after all, would not dedicate themselves. And while most Californians remained ignorant of the rebel markers that dotted their state, Confederate apologists rarely had an easy time of it. They faced funding shortfalls and preoccupied local governments. Even a small group of outraged Union veterans could spell doom for a Confederate marker, as they did for an obelisk honoring Jefferson Davis, erected in San Diego in 1926. Meanwhile, Union memorial organizations dedicated monuments and renamed geographic sites in California at an even faster rate than their Confederate counterparts. Whether cast in bronze, carved in stone, or paved in asphalt, these memorials raised a thorny set of questions: Who belongs in the American pantheon? Who deserves a place on the American map? And, crucially, who does not? Recently, these questions have prompted dramatic and sometimes violent responses in the public spaces of the South. But for nearly a century, the struggle over Civil War memory has been quietly brewing in the infrastructure, graveyards, and natural landscape of the West as well.
Confederate Culture Takes Root
Shortly after the war, and decades before any permanent monument to the Confederacy was erected in California, the language of the Lost Cause migrated west. It made an early appearance in the pages of the San Francisco Examiner, the leading Democratic newspaper in the state. The paper’s editor, Benjamin Franklin Washington, came by his Southern sympathies naturally. Born on a Virginia plantation in 1820, Washington could trace his family lineage to the nation’s first president. He retained his allegiance to the slaveholding class even after moving to California in 1849. There, he rose to prominence within the Democratic Party and assumed the editorship of the Examiner in 1865. Washington filled his columns with invective against Republicans in Congress, federal Reconstruction, and black enfranchisement. He also articulated some of the major tenets of an emerging Lost Cause ideology. Unlike many other proponents of the Lost Cause, Washington was not himself a veteran of the war. His writings, therefore, focused less on military themes than on the ills afflicting the South in the immediate postwar years. But collectively, his columns amounted to perhaps the most forceful apologia for the Old South anywhere in the postbellum West.[10]
As slavery’s staunchest postmortem defender in California, Washington looked on the emancipated South with a shudder and upon its antebellum days with longing. Slavery, he wrote shortly after the war, was the “negro birthright.” The institution, he continued, granted each black person in the South “the protecting care and guardianship of his master who provided for all his wants, and made him a useful member of the community.” Republicans—whom he lambasted as “Abolitionists, Free Lovers, and the rag-tag-and-bobtail of the entire fanatical tribe of New England”—had “robbed” blacks of these protections, throwing the South into disarray.[11] In Washington’s view, African-descended people were “not only totally incapable of self-government, but wholly unfit to be free.”[12] His frequent paeans to human bondage led the San Francisco Elevator, one of California’s African American newspapers, to conclude that Washington “would doubtless like to see the old era reestablished, and slavery triumphant over the land.”[13]
Washington’s nostalgia extended to the leaders of the Old South and soldiers of the Confederacy. He penned tributes to deceased slaveholding luminaries such as John C. Calhoun and defended Jefferson Davis, calling his trial for treason a “shameful, disgraceful and contemptible farce.”[14] Like many other Confederate apologists, Washington blamed Northern abolitionists, rather than Southern rebels, for the outbreak of the war. “We believe now, and always shall believe,” he wrote in 1869, “that the recent war was unnecessary, uncalled for, and wicked in its inception.”[15] As for the white Southerners who waged that war, Washington had only praise. “No men ever embarked in a cause with a more thorough conviction of right and justice than did they,” he argued. “No men conscious of wrong could ever have made the heroic and prolonged resistance against such overwhelming odds.”[16] Washington directly echoed the sentiments of Robert E. Lee’s so-called farewell address of April 1865, which anticipated one of the major themes—Southern courage versus sheer Northern numbers—of the Lost Cause.[17]
While politicos like Washington gave voice to certain tenets of the Lost Cause in the immediate postwar years, the mythology of the Old South reached full flower within California only in the early twentieth century. As was true in the South, women played the leading role in California’s Confederate renaissance. They did so primarily through the UDC, a heredity organization dedicated to commemorating the Southern war effort and its soldiers. Members of the UDC perpetuated this memory through a number of initiatives. They hosted gatherings for rebel veterans; sponsored school textbooks that put a Southern spin on the Civil War; and erected memorials to the leaders and common soldiers of the Confederacy. Riffing on a common Lost Cause trope, the UDC said that its mission was to “tell of the glorious fight against the greatest odds a nation ever faced, that their hallowed memory should never die.”[18] The first chapter was founded in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1894, but within just a few years the UDC had gone continental.
By the turn of the century, several UDC chapters had formed in California, including the Jefferson Davis Chapter (1899), the Emma Sansome Chapter (1899), and the Stonewall Jackson Chapter (1901). Like their counterparts in the South, California’s Daughters dedicated themselves to the care of Confederate veterans, a number of whom had relocated to the Pacific Coast after the war, and to commemorating their military service. Although particularly active in Southern California, the UDC’s Pacific network ran the length of the state. In fact, during this period, no other part of the country beyond the former slaveholding regions contained as many chapters as California.[19]
Despite their prominence, these western chapters have received little attention from academic historians. Without a more extensive study of the origins of the UDC in California, the broader history of the Lost Cause and Civil War memory in the American West will remain incomplete. Fortunately, future scholars have several important archives available to them. Extensive paper collections related to these early California chapters can be found in major repositories across the state, including the University of the Pacific; campuses of the University of California at Davis and Santa Barbara; and California State University, Fullerton.[20] Through these records, historians might explore how the Lost Cause was manifested, not only in the physical landscape, but in popular culture, in school curricula, and in the political orientation of the American West.
The UDC and related Confederate associations played a particularly active role in the cultural life of Los Angeles County. Their prominence within the community was the product of both postwar migration and the state’s deep antebellum roots. Beginning with the gold rush, Southern California attracted a disproportionate share of migrants from the slave states. The major overland road that ran westward from the American South ended in Los Angeles. And while some of these migrants continued north into the gold diggings around Sacramento, a number of them settled in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, where they soon constituted a majority of the U.S.-born population of the county. These migrants wed the region’s political fortunes to the Democratic Party and the slave South, even after California entered the Union as a free state in 1850. At the helm of the city’s political machine sat Joseph Lancaster Brent, a Maryland native and future Confederate general. According to one contemporary observer, Brent carried antebellum Los Angeles in “his vest pocket.”[21] In concert with the large Mexican-born population of the county, Brent preserved a monopoly on power for the Chivalry, the proslavery wing of California’s Democratic Party.[22]
When war erupted between North and South in 1861, a wave of secessionist scares swept across the West. Los Angeles was the beating heart of disunionism in California. Hundreds of rebel sympathizers, including Brent himself, fled Southern California to enlist in the Confederate Army. Among those in the exodus were the Los Angeles Mounted Rifles, a group of eighty secessionists who would become the only organized militia from a free state to fight under a Confederate banner.[23] Other rebel sympathizers stayed put in Southern California, where they constituted a Confederate “fifth column” within U.S. territory. As U.S. authorities attempted to preserve their fragile command over the region, these California rebels demonstrated their disloyalty in a number of ways, from unfurling the Confederate flag in public spaces, to hurrahing Jefferson Davis and his generals, to openly brawling with federal soldiers. As one of Southern California’s rare Unionists recalled in his memoirs, “The leading men of the county were for the Jeff Davis government first, last and all the time.”[24] The threat became so dire that Union officials established a large military garrison outside Los Angeles to prevent the region from slipping into rebel hands. Although California, on the whole, remained loyal to the United States, secessionists in the southern counties presented a near-constant threat.[25]
Given its long proslavery history and enduring Southern connections, Los Angeles was a fitting location for the West’s first major Confederate memorial. In 1925, the Confederate Monument Association of Los Angeles, in conjunction with the UDC, erected a six-foot granite structure in Hollywood Cemetery. It was a tribute to the wartime services of several dozen Confederate veterans who settled in the region after the war and took their final rest under Southern California soil.[26] In anticipation of the monument’s unveiling, California chapters of the UDC hosted several large gatherings. That spring in Pasadena, for instance, a hundred Southern women, “all bubbling with typical Southern hospitality,” hosted the president of the UDC, who entertained the crowd with “a number of southern stories in the negro dialect,” according to the Los Angeles Times.[27] The UDC and the Confederate Monument Association of Los Angeles would eventually purchase seventy-five plots around the monument for soldiers and their families. For years to come, the region’s memorial associations decorated the graves of their fallen soldiers and hosted commemorative gatherings on the cemetery plot.[28]
Erected in 1925, this memorial to Confederate soldiers “who have died or may die on the Pacific coast” stood in Hollywood Forever Cemetery until 2017. It was removed shortly after the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville that August. Photo courtesy of Kevin Waite
Southern California’s Daughters tended to the living as well as the dead. In 1929, the UDC established Dixie Manor, the first and only Confederate veterans’ rest home beyond the former slave states and territories.[29] Located outside Los Angeles in leafy San Gabriel, Dixie Manor was a large, stately structure, leased from the former chief justice of the California Supreme Court and the secretary of the Navy under President Calvin Coolidge. By February of that year, the first veterans had moved in. In April, some five hundred guests gathered for the dedication of the home. Over the next seven years, twenty-one former rebels would pass through the home before they died, most of them bound for the Confederate section of Hollywood Cemetery.[30]
Although not a particularly large operation, it was an expensive one, especially in the midst of a global economic meltdown. Dixie Manor ran on contributions from UDC chapters across the state, whose funds covered food, medical care, allowances for residents, salaries for workers, upkeep for the home, and the cost of frequent celebrations. Hundreds of visitors came to the home each year to pay tribute to the last rebels of the West and, in the process, to perpetuate the memory of the Lost Cause. In 1936, the five remaining veterans died and Dixie Manor was closed.[31]
Jefferson Davis in California
Jefferson Davis came to California with the automobile. The former Confederate president never set foot in the state during his lifetime, but he enjoyed a posthumous presence there in the form of a vast road system named in his honor. Like so many other Lost Cause initiatives, the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway was the brainchild of the UDC. Beginning in 1913, UDC members began lobbying to put their old president on the American map. They conceived of the Davis road as a rival to the recently announced Lincoln Highway from New York to San Francisco, which had been bankrolled by Yankee capitalists. Rather than building new roads, members of the UDC instead threw their collective energy into renaming already-existing auto trails. By designating enough individual highways in Davis’s honor, they hoped to stitch together a continental thoroughfare of Confederate memory. Over the coming decades, the UDC lobbied state governments, erected markers, and mapped out a road system to run the length of the country.[32]
Although Davis would not live to see the age of the automobile, the motorway was a fitting tribute for a man who had championed major transportation projects during his lifetime. As secretary of war and a U.S. senator in the 1850s, Davis spearheaded a decade-long campaign for the nation’s first transcontinental railway. The railroad of his fantasies was to run from the slave states all the way to the Pacific Coast, thereby bringing the South and West into a political and commercial embrace—and perhaps extending the institution of slavery across the American continent. Davis took a particular interest in California, the proposed terminus of his railroad, which he hoped to tether to the slave South with a bond of iron.[33]
Debates over the proposed railway’s route became deeply entangled in the controversy over slavery and the American West. Critics of Davis’s preferred route recognized its ominous potential and dubbed it the “great slavery road.”[34] In the rancorous political atmosphere of the 1850s, Northern politicians closed rank against virtually all proposed southern routes, while Southern leaders struck down numerous bills for northern lines. The result was political quagmire. Only with the secession of eleven slaveholding states in 1861 could plans for a Pacific railroad begin again in earnest. Congress swiftly capitalized on the Southern rebellion and the decisive Republican majority that it produced by passing the Pacific Railroad Act for a line between Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Sacramento. Abraham Lincoln signed the act into law in July 1862.[35] Davis never got his great slavery road.
Yet Davis’s nineteenth-century vision received a twentieth-century reboot in the extensive road system that bears his name. The end result, while not the continuous highway its architects initially envisioned, was a monumental achievement nonetheless. To this day, stretches of the Davis Highway run for hundreds of miles through the South, while dozens of markers to the old rebel can be found across the West, including California. Taken together, the Jefferson Davis Highway is the largest Confederate monument in the country, and it will likely remain the most indelible homage to the Lost Cause.[36]
The UDC erected the first California marker to the Davis Highway in San Diego in 1926. The Daughters thumbed their collective noses at the Union by placing a large stone obelisk dedicated to Davis in Horton Plaza, directly across from the U.S. Grant Hotel, which had been built by the war hero’s son. W. Jefferson Davis, a local attorney and distant relative of the Confederate president, helped to underwrite the cost of the monument. Almost immediately, Union veterans began protesting the presence of this rebel tribute in one of San Diego’s premier locations, and they succeeded in having it carted off later that year. But three decades later, the Confederate South rose again in San Diego, when local members of the UDC reinstalled a Davis Highway marker in Horton Plaza. The new plaque celebrated San Diego as the “Pacific terminus” of the Davis Highway.[37] The marker doubled as a thinly veiled critique of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the landmark school desegregation case recently decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.[38]
Four other Davis Highway markers remain, scattered across the state. One of them, now located in a Bakersfield museum, pays tribute to Davis’s antebellum efforts on behalf of infrastructural development, albeit with a touch of hyperbole. Erected in 1942 by the Mildred Lee Chapter of the UDC, the monument salutes Davis as “The Father of National Highways.” That honorific is a reference to his work, as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce, in overseeing four major transcontinental railroad surveys in 1853–1854. Unsurprisingly, the marker fails to mention that Davis exploited his position in an attempt to extend slavery westward. In his official report, Davis formally endorsed the southernmost of these routes, despite numerous obstacles, while dismissing all routes across free soil as untenable.[39] This Davis monument originally stood in the Central Valley north of Los Angeles, along U.S. 99, until the highway was modernized in the 1960s, at which point the marker was moved to the Kern County Museum in Bakersfield. Another marker to the Davis Highway was erected nearby in 1956 but has since been removed to Fort Tejon State Park. Two other Davis Highway markers currently sit in Hornbrook and Winterhaven, at opposite ends of the state.[40]
No building materials were necessary for some of the grandest California tributes to Davis and his rebel associates. Confederate veterans and members of the UDC simply used the state’s majestic natural landscape to celebrate their old cause. Spanning roughly thirty thousand acres, a scenic range of rock formations known as the Alabama Hills honors one of the Confederacy’s greatest warships. The area, near Lone Pine, was named for the CSS Alabama by Southern sympathizers in the 1860s. The mountains of California also carry the names of rebel commanders. When a number of Confederate veterans settled in Alpine County after the war, they named a nearby peak after their former president. Another mountaintop in the same range commemorates General George E. Pickett, who ordered the bloody, failed charge at Gettysburg in July 1863.[41]
The Alabama Hills, at the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountain range near Lone Pine, were named for the Confederate warship CSS Alabama. Photo courtesy of Bobak Ha’Eri.
Of all the Confederate markers in California, trees named for Robert E. Lee are perhaps the best known and most frequently visited. There are four in total, including the fifth-largest tree in the world (the twelfth-largest excluding reiterations and branches), located in Kings Canyon National Park. It was named by a former Confederate officer in 1875. Other sequoias bearing Lee’s name can be found in Yosemite National Park, Giant Sequoia National Monument, and Sequoia National Park. The UDC formally dedicated the “General Lee” Sequoia with a commemorative gathering in 1937. A handful of California redwoods are named for Union commanders, including Lincoln, Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman.[42]
The Robert E. Lee tree in Kings Canyon National Park is one of four California redwoods named for the rebel general. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia public domain
Education has long been a centerpiece of the Lost Cause tradition, so it is not entirely surprising that several schools in California should be named for rebels. When a Long Beach school took Robert E. Lee’s name in 1935, it elicited some grumbling from local residents. But others, including a commentator as far off as Warren, Pennsylvania, applauded the school. “Northerners have been able to see more and more clearly that the character and knightly manhood of Lee constitute one of the country’s most precious possessions,” read a glowing column in the Warren Times-Mirror.[43] Roughly twenty-five years later, another elementary school named for the Confederate general opened in San Diego, amid a national backlash over school desegregation. In attendance at the school’s dedication were officers of the Stonewall Jackson Chapter of the UDC, who presented a portrait of Lee for the occasion.[44] In East Los Angeles, a middle school bears the name of filmmaker D. W. Griffith. Although Griffith was not a Confederate veteran himself, his 1915 film epic Birth of a Nation did more to romanticize the Lost Cause than anything before it, not to mention reinvigorating the Ku Klux Klan, which had been more or less dormant since the 1870s.
The Vanishing Confederate in Twenty-First-Century California
Like their counterparts in the South, most of California’s Confederate markers were products either of the Jim Crow era or of pushback against civil rights activism in the mid-twentieth century. And as in the South, the Confederate culture of California has recently come under attack for its deep-rooted associations with white supremacy. Nevertheless, the Lost Cause in California lives on, even if diminished in stature. Memorial associations continue to gather, to dispense scholarships to descendants of rebel veterans, and to mobilize politically for the preservation of their monuments. The tide of public opinion may be against them now, but pockets of California have nurtured their Confederate connections into the twenty-first century.
One of the most audacious Confederate monuments in the West was erected as recently as May 2004. It was a curious one: a nine-foot granite pillar in an Orange County cemetery bearing the names of numerous rebels, including some, like Stonewall Jackson, who had never set foot in the state. Inscribed on the monument’s pedestal was characteristic Lost Cause rhetoric, with a Western twist: “to honor the sacred memory of the pioneers who built Orange County after their valiant effort to defend the Cause of Southern Independence.” Some of these Confederate veterans were buried in the Santa Ana cemetery where the monument stood. In this regard, the Orange County marker was not unlike the Hollywood memorial, erected nearly a century earlier. Also like the Hollywood marker, it drew little criticism when a local Confederate memorial association unveiled it. The dedication ceremony, organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, was a celebratory affair, with patrons and supporters posing proudly for the occasion in period costume, including Confederate gray.[45]
The Sons of Confederate Veterans erected this nine-foot granite monument to the rebel veterans of Orange County in 2004. It stood in Santa Ana Cemetery until its removal in August 2019. Photo courtesy of Gustavo Arellano
At the turn of the twenty-first century, rebel memorial associations were still thriving across California, despite their geographic and temporal distance from the Civil War. While the Sons of Confederate Veterans scored perhaps the greatest contemporary coup for the Old South in the Far West with their Santa Ana monument, the UDC maintained a robust presence in California as well. A 1999 national register of the UDC lists eighteen chapters within California alone. For comparison, the next closest free states in terms of UDC activity, Ohio and New York, each had only three chapters. California was also home to more UDC chapters than several former slave states, including Missouri, Kentucky, and Arkansas.[46] UDC membership in California has dipped slightly in recent years, but as of this writing there are still fourteen active chapters within the state, according to the California Division’s official website.[47]
While still numerous, California’s Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy have become more circumspect in recent years. Once a sunny haven for rebel veterans and their offspring, California is now largely hostile to open displays of Confederate heritage. In 2014, the legislature passed a law that prohibits the state from displaying or selling the Confederate battle flag or related imagery, unless for educational purposes. That law, however, drew a First Amendment challenge a year later, after organizers of the Big Fresno Fair, an annual event on state property, barred a Civil War–themed painting showing the Confederate flag. The artist successfully sued, claiming that his depiction of the 1864 Battle of Atlanta, featuring Confederate troops and their flag, had been unlawfully rejected. In the settlement, the state agreed that the ban does not apply to individual citizens, who are free to display and even sell the flag, either on private or public property.[48]
A new Confederate monument on the scale of the Santa Ana pillar would be nearly impossible to erect in present-day California. In the fifteen years since that monument’s dedication, Confederate iconography, and the slave regime it represents, has come under a sustained national attack. Violent neo-Confederates are themselves to blame for the turn in opinion. The anti-Confederate backlash began in 2015 in response to the murder of nine black worshippers, including the senior minister, at one of the nation’s oldest African American churches. The murderer, Dylann Roof, had proudly displayed the Confederate flag in his racist online manifesto before the attack in Charleston. In response, the South Carolina legislature agreed to take down the Confederate battle flag that had flown over their state house for a decade and a half.[49] This was followed by the fiercely contested removal of several monuments to Confederate leaders within New Orleans in spring 2017. Later that summer, the connection between racial hatred and the Confederate flag was again made explicit by an angry crowd of white supremacists who rallied around an equestrian statue to Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. In the ensuing clash between white supremacists and counterprotesters, a Nazi sympathizer drove his car through the crowd, killing a young woman. Numerous Confederate monuments, including several in California, came down in the wake of her death.[50]
Due to its long history and size, the Hollywood memorial received more media coverage than any other Confederate monument removal in California. The story made national headlines and generated several features on National Public Radio and extensive local print and television coverage.[51] While the monument had stood uncontested for nearly a century, its removal came surprisingly swiftly, just days after the violence in Charlottesville.[52] Both the proprietor of the cemetery and the Long Beach Chapter of the UDC, the owner of the monument, yielded to a growing wave of outrage. Activists flooded the Hollywood Forever administration with calls and emails, while an online petition quickly generated more than 1,900 signatures demanding the monument’s removal.[53] A day before it was carted out of the cemetery, the memorial was vandalized with the word “NO” scrawled in black marker across its bronze plaque. When workers packed the Hollywood memorial onto a truck and drove it to an undisclosed location, they purged Los Angeles of its last Confederate link.
Activists have recently challenged Jefferson Davis’s presence in California as well. On the same day that the Los Angeles memorial was hauled out of Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the mayor of San Diego ordered the removal of the Davis Highway marker in Horton Plaza. While the four other Davis Highway markers within the state have not been targeted for removal, none are in their original locations. Other Davis markers in the Far West have been more imaginatively targeted. In August 2017, activists with a particular flare for historical shaming rituals tarred and feathered a Davis Highway monument east of Phoenix, Arizona.[54] The Jeff Davis Peak near Lake Tahoe, California, has retained its name for well over a century, but that too may soon change. The Hung-A-Lel-Ti Woodfords Washoe tribe has proposed a Native name, “Da-ek Dow Go-et” (or “saddle between two points”), in place of the Confederate president’s. The proposal is pending with the U.S. Board of Geographical Names.[55]
Like his rebel commander-in-chief, Robert E. Lee is no longer as prominent in California as he once was. The Confederate general’s name still graces four redwoods within the state, but his schools in Long Beach and San Diego have since been rechristened. After fifty-seven years, Robert E. Lee Elementary in San Diego is now, rather innocuously, Pacific View Leadership Elementary. The renaming occurred in May 2016, largely in response to the events in Charleston. Also in 2016, Lee’s name was stripped from the Long Beach school. It was renamed for Nieto Herrera, a local Mexican American activist and longtime ally of Cesar Chavez in the fight for migrant farmworkers’ rights. Proponents of the name changes argued that within such diverse communities it was incongruous, if not offensive, to continue honoring a man who fought to maintain white supremacy and race-based slavery.[56] There have also been recent calls, including an online petition, to rename D. W. Griffith Middle School in East Los Angeles.[57] To date, however, the school retains its associations with The Birth of a Nation filmmaker.
The Santa Ana cemetery monument may be the shortest-lived Confederate marker in California history. Erected in 2004, the monument was gone by August 2019. As with the memorial in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the Orange County pillar became a casualty of rising local activism as well as vandalism. Just days before its removal, someone defaced the monument with red paint, spraying the word “racists” in large letters down the face of the granite pillar. According to cemetery officials, the monument had become “an unsightly public nuisance” (not to mention a political liability). A one-hundred-foot crane was required to remove the granite structure, which weighs several tons, at an estimated cost of $15,000. For the Sons of Confederate Veterans who erected the monument, the action was tantamount to “Santa Ana spit[ting] on its own history.” For others, though, the removal was more akin to a cleansing, purifying the California landscape of its long association with a slaveholders’ rebellion.[58]
Conclusion
Within the space of a few years, monuments tended by memorial associations for decades have been dismantled or renamed. The oldest and the largest man-made Confederate monuments—those in Hollywood and Santa Ana, respectively—are now gone. So too is the first California marker to the Jefferson Davis Highway, as well as the name of Robert E. Lee from all schools in the state. California, of course, still contains some relics of its Confederate past, including four markers to the Davis Highway, although no California motorists refer to any of their roads by the Confederate president’s name. And while the natural monuments to the Confederacy—Lee’s trees, Davis’s peak, and the Alabama Hills—retain their old names, those too may change.
Perhaps, though, the most surprising aspect of this history is not how quickly these monuments have come down, but how long they survived. For nearly a century, a six-foot granite structure paid tribute to the Confederacy and its soldiers in the heart of Los Angeles. In the teeth of the Great Depression, patrons kept open the doors of Dixie Manor and provided food, housing, and medical care to over twenty ailing veterans. Directly in front of the U. S. Grant Hotel, members of the UDC erected a large obelisk to the Confederate president. And after Union veterans had it hauled away in protest in 1926, the Daughters persisted until it was reinstalled in the mid-1950s. To this day, far more Confederate memorial chapters can be found in California than in any other free state. Physical monuments to the rebellion may be vanishing from California, but these Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy continue to celebrate their peculiar version of the Civil War. Through them, a small part of the slave South lives on in the Far West.
Notes
[1] The perpetrator, James Fields Jr., was convicted of first-degree murder in December 2018; Jonathan M. Katz and Farah Stockman, “James Fields Guilty of First-Degree Murder in Death of Heather Heyer,” New York Times, December 7, 2018.
[2] See the statistics on Confederate markers across the country compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center: https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy. Oklahoma contains about as many Confederate monuments and place-names as California, but because the major Native nations of Indian Territory (roughly the present state of Oklahoma) had legalized slavery and officially sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, I have included Oklahoma in my designation of the “slave South.” The detailed national map of Confederate markers and place-names, compiled by the SPLC, actually misses several in California, including the memorial in Hollywood and another in Orange County.
[3] For a succinct catalog of these monuments and their histories, see Mike Moffitt, “Are All the Monuments to White Supremacy in California Gone Yet?” SFGate, April 7, 2019; and Kevin Waite, “California’s Forgotten Confederate History,” New Republic, August 19, 2019.
[4] California would not ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments until 1959 and 1962, respectively. For the state’s long proslavery history, see Stacey Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Leonard Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2007); Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Kevin Waite, “The Slave South in the Far West: California, the Pacific, and Proslavery Visions of Empire,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2016.
[5] By 1870, there were roughly 21,000 migrants from the former Confederate states in California, far more than could be found in any other Far Western state or territory at the time. For figures, see Francis A. Walker, A Compendium of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870), Compile Pursuant to a Concurrent Resolution of Congress, and Under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 378–388; Eugene H. Berwanger, The West and Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 19–20; Doris Marion Wright, “The Making of Cosmopolitan California: An Analysis of Immigration, 1848–1870,” California Historical Society Quarterly 19 (December 1940), 339.
[6] Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York: E.B. Treat, 1866).
[7] For useful introductions to the history and evolution of the Lost Cause, see Gary W. Gallagher, “Introduction,” and Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the Myth,” both in Gallagher and Nolan (eds.), The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
[8] The literature on the Lost Cause and Civil War memory is vast. For some of the most important works on the subject, see Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2001); Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Caroline Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Caroline Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows, God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, new ed., 2018). On the recent debates over Confederate iconography in particular, see Catherine Clinton (ed.), Confederate Statues and Memorialization (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019). For important recent studies that address Civil War memory in other parts of the West, see Matthew Christopher Hulbert, The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016); and Matthew E. Stanley, The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
[9] See Smith, Freedom’s Frontier; Richards, California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War; Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California; Kevin Waite, West of Slavery: The Continental Crisis of the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming); Joshua Paddison, American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California (Berkeley and San Marino: University of California Press and the Huntington Library, 2012); D. Michael Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013).
[10] Kevin Waite, “The West and Reconstruction after the Civil War,” in Andrew L. Slap (ed.), Oxford Handbook on Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Waite, “Slave South in the Far West,” ch. 6.
[11]San Francisco Examiner, July 24, 1865; June 12, 1865.
[16]San Francisco Examiner, July 23, 1867. For more tributes to the South and southerners, see San Francisco Examiner, July 8, 1868; January 16, 1869.
[17]General Lee’s Farewell Address to the Army of Northern Virginia, April 10, 1865 (Petersburg, 1865), Library of Congress.
[18] Quoted in W. Stuart Towns, Enduring Legacy: Rhetoric and Ritual of the Lost Cause (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 31; see also Cox, Dixie’s Daughters.
[19] This early history is briefly recounted in UDC, United Daughters of the Confederacy Patriot Ancestor Album (Paducah, KY: Turner, 1999), 23–24. The United Confederate Veterans also organized a Pacific Division at the turn of the century. It was headquartered in Los Angeles; see “Organization of Camps in the United Confederate Veterans Association, Prepared Expressly for Use of Delegates to the Thirteenth Reunion and Meeting of the Association” (New Orleans, 1903).
[20] Smaller collections related to the California UDC can be found at the Seaver Center for Western History Research and the Huntington Library.
[21] Joseph Lancaster Brent, Memoirs of the War between the States (New Orleans: Fontana Printing, 1940), 22–23. See also Daniel Lynch, “Southern California Chivalry: Southerners, Californios, and the Forging of an Unlikely Alliance,” California History 91 (Fall 2014); Waite, “Slave South in the Far West,” ch. 3; John Mack Faragher, Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), 376.
[22] Daniel Brendan Lynch, “Southern California Chivalry: The Convergence of Southerners and Californios in the Far Southwest, 1846–1866,” PhD diss., UCLA, 2015.
[24] Horace Bell, On the Old West Coast: Being Further Reminiscences of a Ranger, ed. Lanier Bartlett (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1930), 72.
[25] On the secessionist presence in Civil War California, see Official Records of the War of the Rebellion (hereafter “OR”), series I, vol. L, part 1, pp. 563–566; Sumner to Colonel E. D. Townsend, Assistant Adjutant-General, Department of the Pacific, April 28, 1861, OR, series I, vol. L, part 1, p. 472; [San Francisco businessmen] to Simon Cameron, August 28, 1861, OR, series I, vol. L, part 1, 589–591; San FranciscoBulletin, September 13, 1862; Los AngelesSouthern News, March 1, 1861. See also John W. Robinson, Los Angeles in Civil War Days, 1860–1865 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977, 2013); Glenna Matthews, The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Helen B. Walters, “Confederates in Southern California,” The Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 35 (March 1953); Ronald C. Woolsey. “The Politics of a Lost Cause: ‘Seceshers’ and Democrats in Southern California during the Civil War,” California History 69 (Winter 1990/1991); Woolsey, “Disunion or Dissent? A New Look at an Old Problem in Southern California: Attitudes toward the Civil War,” Southern California Quarterly 66 (Fall 1984); Albert Lucian Lewis, “Los Angeles in the Civil War Decades, 1850–1868,” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1970.
[26] Staff correspondent, “U.D.C.,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1925.
[27] Staff correspondent, “Fete Chief of United Daughters,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1925.
[28] Connie Walton Moretti, Dixie Manor Days: The Confederate Veterans Who Lived There and the UDC Members Who Made It Possible (Redondo Beach, CA.: Mulberry Bush, 2004), 5.
[29] In addition to numerous homes within the former slave states, there was also one in Ardmore, Oklahoma, part of Confederate-held Indian Territory for much of the war. For more on these Confederate soldiers’ homes, see Rusty Williams, My Old Confederate Home: A Respectable Place for Civil War Veterans (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010); and R. B. Rosenburg, Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers’ Homes in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
[31]Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1936; Moretti, Dixie Manor Days, 9–44.
[32] Euan Hague and Edward H. Sebesta, “The Jefferson Davis Highway: Contesting the Confederacy in the Pacific Northwest,” Journal of American Studies 45 (May 2011), 281–301.
[33] Kevin Waite, “Jefferson Davis and Proslavery Visions of Empire in the Far West,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6 (December 2016), 536–565. See also Jefferson Davis, “Report of the Secretary of War, December 3, 1855,” in Dunbar Rowland (ed.), Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1923), vol. 2, 567–570; James Gadsden to Jefferson Davis, May 23, 1853, Jefferson Davis Papers, Special Collections & Archives, Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky.
[34] See the speech of Thomas Jefferson Green near Marshall, Texas, excerpted in the Texas State Gazette, July 29, 1854.
[35]Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd session (May 5, 1862), p. 1948; and 37th Congress, 2nd session (May 6, 1862), p. 1950. See also Robert R. Russel, Improvement of Communication with the Pacific Coast as an Issue in American Politics, 1783–1864 (Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch Press, 1948), 294–307.
[36] This argument first appeared in Kevin Waite, “The Largest Confederate Monument in American Can’t Be Taken Down,” Washington Post, August 22, 2017, which was later anthologized in Clinton, Confederate Statues and Memorialization, 132–136.
[37] Roughly a century earlier, slaveholding railroad developers also eyed San Diego as the most desirable terminus for their proposed transcontinental railroad. See Waite, “Slave South in the Far West,” ch. 2.
[39] Jefferson Davis, Report of the Secretary of War on the Several Pacific Railroad Expeditions (Washington, DC: A.O.P. Nicholson, 1855), 8–34; 37–39; and Waite, “Jefferson Davis and Proslavery Visions of Empire,” 542–544.
[43] “A Fine Example,” Warren Times Mirror, December 17, 1935.
[44] Maureen Magee, “Robert E. Lee school name changed,” San Diego Union-Tribune, May 23, 2016.
[45] Gustavo Arellano, “California’s Last Confederate Monument Is at Santa Ana Cemetery—and It Was Erected in 2004,” OC Weekly, August 17, 2017.
[46] UDC, United Daughters of the Confederacy Patriot Ancestor Album, 5–10.
[47] For a list of active chapters and further information on the UDC’s activities within the state, see the website of the California Division: http://californiaudc.com/.
[48] “California Confederate flag ban excludes individuals, state says,” Associated Press, May 2, 2017; see also “Editorial: Taking a ban on Confederate flag displays to an absurd extreme,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2016.
[49] Sarah McCammon, “2 Years after S.C.’s Flag Came Down, Cities Grapple with Confederate Symbols,” National Public Radio, July 10, 2017.
[50] Leanna Garfield and Ellen Cranley, “More Than a Year after Charlottesville, These Cities across the US Have Torn Down Controversial Confederate Monuments,” Business Insider, January 15, 2019.
[51] For a sampling of that news coverage, across the political spectrum, see Alene Tchekmedyian, Irfan Khan, and Veronica Rocha, “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Removes Confederate Monument after Calls from Activists and Threats of Vandalism,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2017; “Does Los Angeles Have a Confederate Monument problem?” KCRW radio, August 16, 2017; “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Removes Confederate Monument,” KPCC radio, August 16, 2017; Ian Lovett, “Landmark Cemetery in Los Angeles Removes Confederate Monument,” Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2017; Joel B. Pollak, “Threats Force Hollywood Cemetery to Remove Confederate Memorial,” Breitbart, August 16, 2017.
[52] The monument first came to public attention roughly a week before the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, when the Los Angeles Times published my op-ed, “The Struggle over Slavery Was Not Confined to the South, L.A. Has a Confederate Memorial Problem Too,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2017.
[56] Magee, “Robert E. Lee school name changed,” San Diego Union-Tribune, May 23, 2016; Soren Sum, “Robert E. Lee Elementary renamed after Long Beach activist with ties to Cesar Chavez,” Long Beach Post, November 3, 2016.
Kevin Waite is an assistant professor of history at Durham University in the U.K. His first book, a history of slavery and the Civil War in the American West, will be published by University of North Carolina Press next year. Alongside Sarah Barringer Gordon, he is codirector of a major National Endowment for the Humanities–funded project, “The Long Road to Freedom: Biddy Mason and the Making of Black Los Angeles.” He has written about California’s place in the controversy over Confederate monuments for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New Republic, among other popular publications.
With “Postcards,” creative non-fiction stories grounded in place, we aspire to create a new cartography of California. For us, literature and language are as much about marking and representing space, as they are about storytelling.
Nicholas Belardes
I. The Battle of Chester Avenue
We gather south of Chester Avenue’s railroad tracks. Air murmurs with violence. Everyone’s hungry for the blood of what’s taken place, a battle between freight train and car. We gaze at the aftermath. A hellscape. A nightmare. A car mangled in near darkness a few dozen yards from where Dad often takes us for burgers. A&W Root Beer. This is the periphery of how far me and my siblings are allowed to wander from our home on Geneva Avenue.
We heard the crash from our living rooms and front yards and now the community mobs the street. Years later I think this must have been what watching the Civil War was like: a community coming together to observe the collision of gunpowder, steel and flesh. Only, this is our poor man’s take. The barrio version. The working class.
It will be decades before I have any kind of worldview or identity. This is the summer of ‘77. California’s Central Valley. South Bakersfield. A few months before a gargantuan dust storm swallows everything.
Our mixed community as a whole doesn’t seem conscious of itself. Not tonight as we fume and buzz over the train wreck.
I’m small in the crowd. A thing. A feeling. A spore. A lost boy, decades from his struggle to fight political and social forces much greater than this metaphor of rails and blood. Before all the immigration reform marches and rallies. I’m in fourth grade. I don’t realize I’m fighting against this train. It’s smashing into my identity every day, the same way it barrels through Russian thistle and ghosts of. I’m not aware of my hopelessness. I don’t realize I’m the car. I only know I’m here. I want to see the remains of this disaster.
The police won’t allow anyone near the tracks. Not unless you’re a firefighter or detective. From the driver’s seat of our van, Dad, a self-professed ex-Bay Area cop watches the scene with a kind of calm. A vato with a mission. Somehow wanting to teach his kids that our world is violent, mercurial, dangerous. He seems attracted to the pull of violence, like he has to be in the middle of it. And since my brother, sister and I feel safe around him, we’re eager as we slowly park alongside this mass of bodies that fills this usually busy thoroughfare.
The freight train sprawls across Chester Avenue in semi-darkness. The car twisted and smashed against its engine. Detectives hunt with flashlights further down the tracks.
Parents, teenagers, and kids have congregated. What makes this crowd special is all the forgotten hate between neighbors. These people live next door to each other but never talk. They secretly throw rocks at each other’s windows when they’re not home. All the bullies are here too. The ones who pick on me at school—friendly during this snapshot of violence. All making up stories as fast as their mouths can yammer. They want to be heard. Even if only a half peckerwood like me is listening.
Necks crane to see what might happen next, whether ghosts might rise from rocks and dirt. Whether bodies might slip out of the mangled car and stumble herky-jerk down the rails.
“They’re looking for a hand,” says Ruben, a bully with a mouth scar that looks like his lips had once been sewed together.
Other rumors fly like bats. The train smashed into the car on purpose. The car flew across the tracks on a dare. A semi pushed the car into the train. Black, white, Japanese-American, Mexican-American—doesn’t matter who makes up each conspiracy. This could have been a meteor strike or space alien invasion and these people would have banded together to talk shit like it really happened. This is something I’ve never seen in the neighborhood. Something I will never see again except at South High School football games when families from the projects and low-income housing come to root on their racist mascots made in the image of Confederate militants. It’s insane if you think about it: Confederate imagery in the mixed-race neighborhoods of South Bakersfield.
The Belardes family in the 1970s. Photograph courtesy of author.
II. A White Mythology
Confederate and Civil War imagery surround me. It’s 1982. I’m fourteen, a freshman at South High School. Home of the Rebels. The Blue & Gray. The Merrimac Yearbook. Johnny and Jody yell leaders in military-style grey uniforms and Confederate hats. Our mascot is a cartoon Confederate soldier. I don’t understand what I’m seeing. I don’t understand racism, slavery, war, who fought what or when, and for what cause. I’m so caught up in our school spirit I pin a tiny Confederate flag to a Confederate soldier hat my Mexican-American dad brings home from a swapmeet. He thinks it’s cool. I think this is what high school is all about. Rebel soldiers. Like Star Wars. Like The Empire Strikes Back. I don’t realize a cartoon mascot is a symbol for retaining an economic system that allows for the horrific right to own slaves. I somehow think I’m one of the good guys.
Street names around South High are all Civil War-inspired. Sumter, Merrimac, Monitor, Rebel, Raider, Evelyn. Evelyn might be Evelyn Magruder DeJarnette, a white nineteenth-century writer. She taught slave kids on a Virginia plantation. She culturally appropriated them by writing stories in slave dialect. Her husband was a captain for the Confederate Army, a farmer who owned slaves.
Take a turn down White (Supremacist) Lane onto Monitor Street and you’ll reach Plantation Avenue. An elementary school by the same name still stands there (So do the street names).
III. The Gridiron Race Riot
Sometime between 1984 and 1986 I’m in the stands above our school’s sunken gridiron battlefield for a matchup between North and South high schools. I’m tossing confetti, chanting cheers. I’m really into it when both football teams transform gridiron to full-on mob violence. Karate jump-kicks. Flying fists. Helmets swung like morning stars. A football coach gets smacked with a clipboard. Students and parents run from the stands. Not to break up the fight but to join in. If ever there’s a melee fueled by racism this is it, our twisted fabrication of North versus South. On one side, South High—empowered with its white mythology, though a mixed race school. On the other, North High, embedded in a mostly white community called Oildale, firmly empowered with its own white superiority complex and racist intentions.
While this is a mixed-race school versus a white school, I suspect South High football players of color had images in their heads of being shot if they enter the wrong side of town, of crosses burning in yards, of kids getting lynched outside the dirt-floor shanties of Oildale, California. This is the fear fed to us about the northern suburbs of Bakersfield. If you’re brown, you stay out of that town.
I can only imagine what’s been said on the field, what parents of either team have been feeding the minds of their children. Decades later a Black former South High football star tells me the n-word had been dropped regularly by North High’s feeder teams in years prior during peewee games. “We knew the level of hatred against our melting pot of a school,” he said. “That [North-South] game had been eagerly anticipated.”
IV. A Racism Origin Story
By the time Dad moves us to Geneva Avenue in 1976, the area is fairly mixed: Black, Mexican-American, Japanese-American, white. A wave of Vietnamese immigrants is on the way.
Our neighbors are Mexican-American on one side and white on the other. After the Mexican-American couple moves out, a Black man moves in. Dad doesn’t use that word when referencing him. He uses the n-word. There’s a clear hatred from my old man. Our neighbor avoids Dad, avoids all of us. You can see it in how quickly he enters his house, how he’s never outside, never greeting us. We never have a conversation in the four or five years we share the neighborhood.
I always wonder if Dad had ever really been a cop. In 2019, two decades after his death, one of my uncles says Dad’s cop stories were lies. I’d already seen photos of him in a uniform. Then a retired cop checking in to see if former academy members had died, phoned. Dad’s name had been on a list. Dad had definitely enrolled at the San Jose Police Academy in the 1960s. One of the first Latinos there, no less. Proof that he hung out with and had been influenced by powerful white men.
But had he been an actual cop?
And if he had been a cop, why hadn’t he stuck with it? One family member said he couldn’t pass the height requirements at the time. Maybe he didn’t want some low-paying security gig as a result. That wasted police education maybe not only put that killer look in his eye, perhaps it transformed him into the assimilationist he was.
That means I was assimilated. No Spanish was taught in the home. Dad constantly told me I was white. He bought Confederate flags for my bedroom wall. Mostly American foods were put on the dinner table. Racist epithets were used in conversation and jokes. “Chicano” was never uttered.
Truth is, we’re a dual-ethnic family in our south Bakersfield neighborhood during those mid 1970s and early 1980s. The streets are rough for me as a result. Neighborhood fights get fueled by kids with giant boy egos and petty racial differences. More than a few punches get thrown. I usually just receive them. Terrified, I stand my ground, take some licks, never really understanding why fists matter. I toss a lunchpail at one kid’s head who fights my brother over us “peckerwoods” being in their hood. I’m too stupid to argue that I’m Mexican-American, Latino, or Hispanic. I think I’m white though my father’s brown as an oak-stained table. I run for my life. I hide in my room. I’m afraid of black vampires outside my window.
Dad just wants me to fight. He’s bragged for years that he was a cop. I want him to be a cop, my cop. But he doesn’t help or show me how to fight. He orders me to “straighten up,” to “be tough” with those n-word boys down the street. He talks tough, but what else is he? A brown cowboy? Some white image he’s pulled from American cinema? He loves John Wayne, Charles Bronson. He worships Dirty Harry, Billy Jack. Blazing Saddles. He wears a black cowboy hat. He drives a tanker truck hauling gas for an oil company. I later refer to him as mothertrucker. He carries a gun in a shoulder holster. He buys me and my brother cowboy hats and boots. He wants us to be him. He wants us to be what he isn’t.
V. Yell Leaders, Mascots and Monuments
Johnny and Jody Rebel stand on podiums on the edge of a stadium racetrack. All eyes on them in their Confederate uniforms as they lead cheers. It’s 1986. Johnny is a Mexican-American kid named Gabe. Jody is a Black girl named Georgia. Together they upend the image of the Confederate South. At the same time, they become a mockery, performing a bizarre cultural appropriation of oppressive white heritage that transforms students into puppetry. An entire mythology has been reproduced on the backs of Black and Mexican-American children. In this white thuggish military garb that literally screams enslavement, kids are transformed. They lose self-identity in the supremacist imagery before the crowd. They’re reduced to monuments. Symbols of a war meant to oppress, that sought to continue a way of life that made Southern planters wealthy.
The Confederate flag once flew over South High School. It was banned in 1968, the year I was born. No Confederate imagery is retired during my education there. Not the school mascot. Not the rebel military uniforms on yell leaders. Not the street names. Not the school names. Not even Plantation Elementary School.
Killing a flag wasn’t ever going to erase its shadowy image of oppression. Not with all the blue and grey. Not with all the misplaced school pride placed upon so many high school kids screaming rebel chants. A school’s fanatical pride isn’t unlike Southerner pride suggesting that times have changed when they haven’t.
VI. Marching
Author, second to the right, marching.
On March 30, 2006, students from Bakersfield area high schools, including South High pour into downtown. I’m documenting the march for my blog wishing I’d been one of these high school kids as their throng enters a wide plaza outside the Rabobank Arena and Civic Auditorium.
Part of me is ashamed. Not for the kids. For me. But I don’t have time to reflect on South High, why it’s still seeped in Confederate mythology, or why my past haunts me. Right now it’s just me and a KERO news crew. We’re the only ones documenting this historic moment akin to the 1968 East L.A. blowout.
Then a car speeds alongside the curb. Out jumps Kern County’s controversial District Attorney Ed Jagels, mastermind of 25 false convictions during the Satanic Panic. Well-known for his ridiculous media posturing, he plants his face in his hands in mock desperation, as if the kids now swarming the plaza are about to climb the battlements and lay siege to a fountain.
A few days later I’m at Jastro Park documenting another rally alongside an AP news photographer. We’re on the same stage as Dolores Huerta. An ocean of red farm worker flags wave in front of her as she she dances with CSU Bakersfield professor Gonzalo Santos during a ranchera melody. I’m pulled into this. I’m feeling this intersection between farm workers, immigrant rights and the Chicano Movement. There’s something here I need to fight for.
By May 1st I’m taking part as an honored poet, hands shaking on stage at Beach Park, reading “Immigration! Interrogation!” to a sea of 10,000-15,000. It doesn’t enter my mind to think, Here I am, former South High Student on stage! Not at all. By this time, South High is lost to me, a place that should have corrected itself long ago. I take no pride in my connections to that institution, only shame. If anything, I close my eyes and see my street, Geneva Avenue. I see the paths I walked to school. I see the dirt fields and hear the train crashing over and over again.
Eleven years later it’s May 1, 2017. I text my youngest son Landen to see if he’ll come to Mill Creek Park to listen to me present, “The Mother of All Bombs,” a poem less about Donald Trump’s propaganda war machine, and more a revelation about ironies of oppression, the anger that is connected to it in relation to the southern Central Valley. I realize that one portion of the lengthy poem feels so much like it’s from where I grew up in South Bakersfield. Though about the oppression of place, I’ve generalized my own streets. I’ve hidden my old school, my old haunts, even my old living room on Geneva, with Dad inside telling me how white I am.
The Mother of All Bombs is the woman down the street laughing at my words then waking up tomorrow realizing she’s felt the heavy weight of America too. How long did it take her to understand she’d taken on the characteristics of the oppressor, that she was insane, drooling with madness in the Church of Intolerance, while her own children were hungrier than ours under the continued shame of Make America Great Again, which here in the San Joaquin Valley is a new special blend of McCarthyism.
After a long line of us march downtown, those of us who carried the American flag walk onto the stage. Music blasts from speakers. Some start dancing. I gaze into the crowd and see my son. I feel a pride I can’t explain. A connecting point. A circle re-attached. Landen and I were part of that march nearly eleven years before. He’d walked out with all those high school kids in 2006. We’d both later attended President Obama’s speech at La Paz, a historic dedication of Cesar Chavez’ resting place as a National Monument.
Prior to, and after that day in 2017, my son and I continue to share father-son discussions about art, words, music, taking risks, about not being afraid to make a statement about the world, and to the world. He’s often working on songs and sends rough cuts. Sometimes we call each other afterwards, talking about his latest lyrics, drum beats and guitar riffs. As we often do, we shift our focus to peoples and behaviors, to speaking up for others, to ways in which we can inject a more purposeful truth into our art. Inevitably, during these moments, I drift. Sometimes for only a second. That’s all it takes. The place is usually the same. I’m back in that old living room on Geneva Avenue. I see Dad’s face but I don’t hear anything as he talks to me. I see his eyes. I see that grim mouth. And I see change coming.
Nicholas Belardes’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in Latino Rebels, The Latinx Archive: Speculative Fiction for Dreamers (Ohio State University Press), Southwestern American Literature (Texas State University), Carve Magazine, and others. Read more at nicholasbelardes.com. Follow him on twitter @nickbelardes
The rampant spread of coronavirus throughout the United States has illuminated undocumented migrants’ role as essential workers as well as their precarious position in this country. Indeed, Trump’s administration continues to find novel measures to expel undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. In The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants, Adam Goodman traces the United States’ efforts to expel and terrorize migrants as well as people’s efforts to stop the deportation machine. Historian Elliott Young spoke with Goodman about his new book and this long history.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Elliott Young (EY): What led you to this particular book project and how do you think it responds to the present immigration crisis?
Adam Goodman (AG): My interest in immigration started to deepen when I was living and teaching high school on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. Seeing the ways that migration policies shaped both the region and the lives of my students and their families piqued my interest in learning more about migration history. When I got to graduate school, the historiography and the literature really captured my imagination. That was at the start of Obama’s first term, when there was a lot of attention on his immigration enforcement actions. The issues that have dominated news headlines in recent years are not unique to Trump and they didn’t start with Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton either; the origins of the deportation machine date back to the late nineteenth century.
EY: One of the big arguments you make in your book is that we need to consider all forms of deportation. That term deportation is used colloquially, but as you show the immigration bureaucracy divides these up into what are “voluntary returns” and so-called self-deportations where conditions are such that people are pushed out, along with formal removals that are done through a legal process. What kinds of insights does this more holistic view of these forms of deportation provide?
AG: Having this broader understanding of deportation sheds light on expulsion’s importance throughout the twentieth century, the fashioning of state power, and how deportation—or the possibility of being deported—shapes people’s lives. It also shifts the chronology. Deportation isn’t something that just emerges after the Immigration Act of 1996, which led to a spike in formal deportations, or after 9/11. There are a tremendous number of people who have been removed through formal deportations—8 million or so throughout US history. (The vast majority during the past 25 years.) But there are 48 million people who have been deported via voluntary departure, and an uncountable number of others who have left in response to self-deportation campaigns. So, if we want to understand the history of deportation, we need to expand our time frame and look at how 85-90% of the expulsions throughout U.S. history have happened. Which, in turn, reveals that Mexicans have been even more disproportionately targeted than we thought.
EY: Given that so many scholars start by looking at formal deportations to make the argument that everything changes in the 1980s and beyond, what do you think the qualitative differences are between the informal or voluntary returns versus the formal and legal deportations?
AG: It’s important to distinguish and delineate the different types of expulsion. I argue that we shouldn’t conflate them, but should instead understand how they work in conjunction with one another, because that’s how the deportation machine functions. Formal deportations, historically, have carried more severe penalties and consequences, including bans on re-entry of five, ten or twenty years, or sometimes even lifetime bans. You also might have to spend an extended or indefinite period of time in detention. Many people recognized that’s not a very appealing option and immigration authorities used the threat of bans on re-entry and of indefinite detention to coerce people into accepting administrative removals via voluntary departure. In the book, I equate this to the role plea bargains play in the criminal justice system. If officials threaten someone with 25 years in prison, they might take a plea for four years to mitigate the risk. It’s somewhat similar as to why someone would accept voluntary departure. I recognize the important difference between types of expulsion, while also arguing that voluntary departures have been punitive in nature. They weren’t simply part of a nod-and-wink system in which immigration authorities let people come and go in a pattern of circular migration while employers were able to maintain a cheap exploitable supply of workers. The stereotype of Mexicans as “illegal aliens” has been created, in part, through repeated apprehension and deportation via voluntary departure.
EY: Why does the government turn to the tactic of voluntary removal in the early twentieth century?
AG: Immigration officials never had the resources they needed to carry out the enforcement actions that Congress charged them with implementing. At different moments officials wanted to apprehend and deport more people, but they didn’t have the resources to do so. Congress wasn’t willing to provide them, and perhaps the United States public didn’t have the stomach for such actions either. This led to voluntary departures and informal means to deport people, which depended on giving discretion to low level immigration authorities who, within the system as a whole, had very little power, but had complete or near total power over any one individual migrant. That’s largely still the same today.
Activist and organizer José Jacques Medina speaks to a crowd of more than 200 people at the Embassy Auditorium in Los Angeles, March 1977, Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
EY: You show in the book how the well-publicized workplace raids and other kinds of raids that happened in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s are calculated campaigns that sowed fear and terror in immigrant communities to provoke them to “self-deport.” Do you think the workplace raids in recent years are done for the same purpose? In other words, are these principally propaganda campaigns to instill fear in immigrant communities?
AG: This administration has ratcheted up the fear campaigns and is doing everything it can to instill fear in immigrant communities. That’s happening through public proclamations by officials; it’s happening by leaking things to the press and carefully placing stories; it’s happening by relying on an extensive network of restrictionist think tanks and policy groups that promote an anti-immigrant agenda within Washington in hopes of making it more mainstream. I should point out here that in spite of such self-deportations campaigns, the majority of people have stayed. When Trump took office there were an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Most of those people are still here. It’s important to recognize the way pervasive fear campaigns not only lead to self-deportation, but also affect and shape the lives of people who remain in the country.
EY: In one of your chapters, you describe the resistance by a group of shoe factory workers in South El Monte, right outside of Los Angeles. They refused to answer immigration agents’ questions and thereby blocked deportation efforts. This led to a lawsuit that in 1992 resulted in the recognition that immigrants are protected by certain elements of the Constitution and that immigration agents have to make immigrants aware of such rights when they’re being arrested. So, it’s a kind of success story in your book. But following that success story is a tremendous rise in the numbers of immigrants deported. I’m wondering whether legal strategies have been successful in protecting immigrants.
Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
AG: I’m interested in how people have endured, adapted, and fought against the machine. The chapter you’re referring to looks at the 1970s, in particular, what I call the dawn of the age of mass expulsion, when we see the number of deportations rise exponentially and reach 900,000-plus people per year (which continues until the end of the century). This was a different era. Building on the Chicano/a and civil rights movements, they took to the streets. They also took their fight to the courts, and the case of the shoe factory workers is an inspiring story because of how people organized. That was one of the key takeaways: It wasn’t individuals engaging in random acts of resistance, it was the joint efforts of immigrant workers, labor organizers, activists, and lawyers that threatened to bring the deportation machine to a halt. The deportation machine was vulnerable and it remains so today. Part of the job of undocumented immigrants and their allies is to identify how the machine works and where its points of vulnerability are, and to press on them.
EY: Is the trend we see since 2000 positive, in that we have a decreasing number of total deportations even though formal removals have increased significantly, reaching their height under President Obama? How do you interpret the last two decades of deportation history?
AG: How many people are deported each year matters, of course, but what also matters is how people are expelled and how the consequences of being deported have changed over time. What we see is that deportation has become more punitive and separation more permanent, because of the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, the explosion in enforcement funding, and the rise in formal deportations. I’m interested in the experiences of deportees and understanding things from their perspective. Simply looking at the number of expulsions and stopping there isn’t sufficient.
EY: I want to bring you to the point where historians never want to go, which is thinking about policy. You’ve talked about how deportations have been a bipartisan policy for more than a century. And, you argue that no particular party or president is responsible for the creation of this deportation machine, something I would definitely agree with. That being said, what kinds of immigration policies would you advocate? And do either the major political parties offer a way to turn the United States into a nation of immigrants, rather than a deportation nation as you described in your epilogue?
AG: The Trump administration has made immigration policy more partisan. Whereas Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Republicans and Democrats in Congress supported policies ramping up enforcement, today we see Democrats trying to stake out a different position. I’m a little skeptical about whether that will lead to real change; I’ll defer judgment. That being said, there are reforms that would solve a lot of the problems related to immigration policy. So much now is focused on national security and the needs of the nation, without reckoning with the fact that the migrants—the people these policies affect most—are very much a part of this nation. Allowing people to reunite with families, allowing people to come fill the country’s labor demands, creating more visa slots for Mexicans and doing away with the one-size-fits-all 20,000-person-per-year country quota are just some common sense proposals. Many people in the United States face real economic hardship, there’s no denying that. But scapegoating migrants is not the answer.
EY: The idea of prison abolition has been a powerful political way of conceptualizing the campaign against mass incarceration. I’m wondering if you think there should be a similar campaign to abolish immigration detention and deportation?
AG: Yes, and people are doing this work already. Groups like Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) here in Chicago, the Detention Watch Network, and many others. A lot of community-based, grassroots organizations across the country are advocating bold policy reforms and their voices need to be heard; those possibilities need to be on the table. Whether or not we see such radical change in our lifetime is up in the air. But one thing history teaches us is that sometimes, when we’re least expecting it, transformative change happens, and it usually isn’t by luck—it’s through organizing and through sustained struggle.
Adam Goodman teaches in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program and in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His writing on immigration history and policy has appeared in outlets such as the Washington Post, The Nation, and the Journal of American History. Goodman is a faculty advisor to UIC’s Fearless Undocumented Alliance, a co-convener of the Newberry Library’s Borderlands and Latino/a Studies seminar, and a co-organizer of the #ImmigrationSyllabus public history project. The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020) is his first book.
Plagued by unsavory stories in American popular culture, the lunch lady has been a mocked and villainized figure for decades. Yet, as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds in real-time, lunch ladies across the country are emerging as unassuming superheroes feeding millions across the United States.
Because of school closures and an economic downturn, school food is assuming a major role in providing emergency meals for their communities. Some are doing so independently and others have partnered with local food banks, faith-based organizations, and the Red Cross. With nearly 75 million children under the age of eighteen across the country,[1] coupled with families losing their incomes at a startling rate, more and more people are in need of food. In the first three weeks of shelter-in-place orders, sixteen million Americans filed for unemployment[2] while in nearly the same three-week period, the Los Angeles Unified School District served five million meals to children and adults.[3]
Arroyo High Schools in El Monte, California
Yet unlike the origin stories of comic book heroes, the history of the lunch lady has been almost entirely erased. Moreover, their collective stories have fallen victim to historical amnesia. As a result, school food, as a sector, is invisible to and undervalued by society. For decades, most lunch ladies held some of the lowest paying jobs in school systems, making hourly wages with little to no benefits—creating a lasting impact on their economic and social worth. This is the underappreciated workforce that the United States now looks to for support.
More than ever, it is important to elevate the origin story of the lunch lady. As comic books have taught us, we can’t undo the past but we can learn from it as we move on to create future narratives, where lunch ladies (and gentlemen, or more gender non-conforming “food folks”) are acknowledged and respected for the essential workers that they are, during and outside of a pandemic. To bring those narratives to light, Jennifer Gaddis gives us their origin story in The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools (UC Press, 2019).
In her book, Gaddis addresses implicit biases the reader may hold about lunch ladies by guiding us through a richly-layered history of school food and labor. Using archival photos and first-hand stories, she connects us with narratives that have been withheld from our collective consciousness. She addresses the inequities of this work head on by laying out the historic role that racial and economic discrimination, capitalism, and patriarchy played in perpetuating stereotypes of school food service workers.
Gaddis sets the stage for the book not in faraway time or even in a cafeteria. She starts the book in 2004 with Lisa, a 48-year-old assistant cook, testifying in front of a local school board: “Good evening, distinguished board members and all in the room who have an ethical obligation to our children. I see some faces whose children I have had the honor of personally feeding. I use the word honor because it is the highest trust a parent can give, letting someone else care and nurture their children” (1). In her own words, Lisa addresses the board as an advocate and labor union member, identities not often associated with lunch ladies.
UNITE HERE Local 1 workers gather in protest outside Chicago Public Schools head-quarters in April 2012 as part of a series of actions in their real-food, real-jobs campaigns.Courtesy UNITE HERE
Further so, she aptly titles the first chapter of the book, “The Radical Roots of School Lunch.” This foundational section to the book disaggregates the history you may find on the internet when you search for “school lunch.” Gaddis tells a history of a movement that began half a century before the passing of the 1946 National School Lunch Act, by firmly rooting school food history alongside feminist history, calling it a “product of generations of women’s activism.” In fact, school lunch started out in the 1890s as a localized “penny lunch” program as part of a “nonprofit school lunch movement.” It was born out of a public necessity to feed extremely poor children, “not as private, gendered responsibility” (18). School lunch, along with kindergarten and public kitchens, were just some approaches advocates used to create new forms of public caregiving to support the changing roles of women during this industrializing era.
A federal policy that paves the way for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) can appear to be a win, but who is actually benefiting from the program? Gaddis examines the systemic racial inequities that excluded many populations of color under the federal school lunch program. In the chapter, “The Fight for Food Justice,” Gaddis discusses the role of the Black Panther Party in organizing local support for poor black communities whose needs were unmet by the government. In 1968, a group of Oakland mothers worked alongside the Panthers to start the very first Free Breakfast for Children Program. This program resulted in a national movement of localized expansion in poor black communities that would feed tens of thousands of poor black children across the country while exposing inequities, and demonstrating to the American public “a working example of how social reproduction could be collectivized at the neighborhood scale in a truly egalitarian fashion” (62).
In addition to social and political movements, the chronology of school food is also heavily influenced by the industrialization of food and rise of the cheap food economy, as well as the government’s role in regulating what goes into school meals. In 1981, the Reagan administration reduced the school food budget by one-third, resulting in the need to cut costs by changing regulations to include cheaper substitutes. A task force was convened to discuss cheaper alternatives to certain meal components: “Suddenly corn chips, pretzels, doughnuts, and pies could all pass as ‘bread’ in the NSLP” (98). Gaddis also describes the shifting labor of school lunch, as more central kitchen models were being constructed and for-profit Big Food factories began receiving more contracts to turn commodity foods like chicken into nuggets. These shifts led to reheating already prepared foods and diminishing a school cafeteria’s capacity to cook from scratch. This period, according to Gaddis, had a stark effect on the school food programming across the country.
Workers making prepack sandwiches in a central kitchen facility. Records of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1974-ca. 2003, National Archives and Records Administration.
Despite the challenges that exist in school food, Gaddis positions a lofty goal for the school food sector: “Empowering school kitchen and cafeteria workers to cook real food from scratch using locally sourced and school-grown ingredients can transform the entire culture of [NSLP]” (174). Rather than one-off solutions or one-size fits all approaches, Gaddis offers several examples to realize this “real food economy.” One approach is farm-to-school, by which schools can connect and buy directly from local farmers. This type of programming effectively builds relationships with food so that we know where it comes from. This requires coordinated efforts and investments: “Establishing comprehensive farm-to-school programs that combine local food procurement, school gardening, and classroom education takes significant effort that is difficult to sustain without grant funding and personal donations” (196). Identifying and working with local partners is key to making this change. Gaddis reminds us of this shared responsibility: “The NSLP is a public program. And we, the public, can reimagine and ultimately transform it into an engine for positive social and economic change” (214). We must remember that to feed children, we must also employ people to serve, cook, transport, and grow food. In effect, this would stimulate the economy, not take away from it.
Making these sweeping changes to the school food system requires a greater shift in society. Gaddis positions the notion of a real school food system into a new economy of care. How do we care about school food and the labor behind it? Gaddis reminds us that the value of school food and labor is dependent on our collective respect for it: “It’s up to us to change the paradigm. Cheapness is not synonymous with public value.” (228). Now more than ever, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, food service workers across the country need this paradigm shift as they risk their own health to feed millions of children. By valuing their labor and school food we can better support them on the frontlines of this public health crisis.
Christine Tran is a food and education advocate from South El Monte, California. She is passionate about people, places, food, and stories that connect us all. Her diverse background in education, food justice, communities, and policy has taken her across the country and around the world. As a multimedia storyteller, she aspires to spark dialogues to deepen our understanding of each other, the food we eat, and the world we share. Christine is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington studying Educational Leadership, Policy & Organizations. She obtained her bachelor’s degrees in Asian American Studies and English, as well as a Master of Education from UCLA. She also holds a Master of Arts in sociology from Columbia University in the City of New York.
