California’s big, storied past gets a nuanced, superbly researched retelling in one volume

If California were a country, its gross domestic product would rank fifth in the world, behind only the United States, China, Japan and Germany. As a mere state, its impact — cultural, political, mythical — is impossible to quantify. It’s a world of its own, a place where people go to dream or start over, to soak in the sun and cower in the face of inevitable natural disaster, the universe’s way of exacting a price for so much beauty. It is, in every sense, big.

It’s hard to fathom wrapping one’s arms around it in one volume, as Michael Hiltzik does in “Golden State: The Making of California.” Hiltzik proceeds methodically but vigorously, and with a healthy dose of skepticism. A Los Angeles Times business columnist whose previous book subjects include the New Deal and the Hoover Dam, he is neither a booster nor a naysayer, although any honest and thorough history of California is by definition also a history of graft, corruption and even genocide. He manages to mix an outsider’s sense of wonder — Hiltzik moved to Los Angeles briefly from his native East Coast in his late 20s, in 1981, before returning to New York and coming back for good in the mid-’90s — with a longtime resident’s knowledge of the state’s many meanings.

Mostly, though, he brings to the task a journalist’s reluctance to take anything at face value and a distrust of conventional wisdom. These qualities are on full display in Hiltzik’s handling of a subject without which there would be no Los Angeles as we know it: water.

“Golden State” author Michael Hiltzik.

(Amy Myers)

The story of how a team led by Fred Eaton and William Mulholland gobbled up Owens Valley and delivered its water to L.A. in the early 20th century has been well chronicled, and even fictionalized in the indelible 1974 neo-noir movie “Chinatown.” The film, as Hiltzik writes, “transposes the story to the 1930s, treats every claim of official and private skulduggery as gospel truth, and sets it all against a blood-soaked backdrop of murder and incest.” Without excusing any part of the real-life swindle, Hiltzik places nuance above hysteria in addressing the contentious Los Angeles Aqueduct project: “It is true that the aqueduct made some of the richest tycoons in Los Angeles richer but not true that their greed was all that motivated its construction.” Not that such nuance mattered to the irate Owens Valley residents who took to dynamiting the aqueduct.

Then again, the Owens Valley Water Wars were a breezy day at Venice Beach compared to some of the darker days of California history.

There was the 1880 Humboldt Massacre, in which unprovoked white settlers slaughtered 285 Native Americans, including women and children, over the course of a week in Northern California. As Hiltzik writes, “Indian massacres would continue for more than a decade, accompanied by the kidnappings of thousands of women and children into prostitution and slavery.”

There was the violent campaign to get Chinese immigrants out of San Francisco (they were more than welcome before they started competing with white people for decent jobs), and Executive Order 9066, which sent more than 120,000 Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese descent — most of them Californians — to incarceration camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

(Mariner Books)

And for sheer, brazen profiteering, little can match the creation of the Central Pacific Railroad, which the infamous Big Four — Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins Jr., Charles Crocker and Collis Potter Huntington — managed to turn into their private piggy bank. Here we see that the history of California is perhaps above all a history of money: how to extract it from the land, how to arrive from distant places to accumulate it and how to concentrate it in a select group of hands.

Any of these subjects could be (and have been) book subjects on their own; Hiltzik himself wrote the 2020 book “Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America.” Here he does well to streamline a potentially unwieldy narrative into an eminently readable 448 pages. By necessity, some topics and places get short shrift, including the Summer of Love, the Manson Family murders (and the subsequent panic that engulfed Los Angeles) and the 1992 Rodney King riots, which get folded into a superbly researched chapter on the 1965 Watts uprising.

But Hiltzik also excels at creating subtle, almost invisible master narratives. Chief among these is how the state’s center of gravity shifted from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the 20th century. The Gold Rush, as Hiltzik writes, “launched a population surge unprecedented in American history and initiated San Francisco’s evolution from a sleepy settlement of squalid tents and combustible wooden shacks into a world-class metropolis.” Some of the book’s most sordid (and entertaining) chapters detail the city’s growing pains as a Wild West city, complete with widespread vigilante justice.

But then the water came to the seemingly limitless, paradisiacal geography of Los Angeles. The dreamers (and the Hollywood dream factory) soon followed, as L.A. became an almost mythical haven for East Coasters and Midwesterners seeking warmer climates and a new world. From these circumstances sprang a city of nearly 4 million people. It’s no accident that much of the book’s second half revolves around that city. It was the future. In many ways, for better or worse, it still is.

Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer.