Sociology of place and the California coast

Northern and Southern California -- Cultural and Geological Differences

Unintentionally, the recent death of President Reagan combined with the growing media fixation on the celebrity culture of the Hollywood entertainment industry creates a juxtaposition between the two cultures present in California -- that of the conservative and wealthy enclaves of Southern California's Seamy Valley and Orange County, and the liberal and open attitudes typified by the Northern Californian Los Angeles movie moguls that gave Reagan the Democratic Party leanings he ultimately reacted to as a politician. Thus California is a paradox -- a huge state that is extremely wealthy, a magnet for illegal immigration, a cite of cultural ferment for the entire nation and the home base of Proposition 13 and the Reagan conservative social and economic revolution that took control of the nation during the 1980's. "California, in fact," seems "to be evolving culturally into a federation of regional autonomies as far as cultural value and lifestyles [are] concerned," notes even the state's official librarian, Kevin Starr. ("California: The Dream, the Challenge," 2001)

The pictorial and verbal images that make up the common images of California are similarly diverse as the state's geography and demographics itself. It has hard to believe, at times, they all pertain to the same state of the American Union. The summer of Love. The Beach Boys. Roller-skating gay men wearing nun's costumes. A place where the relocation of Rodney King's attackers could change the course of their trial. Salsa. Merlot wine. Today there have "emerged many Californias, at once distinct and integrated," rather than a clearly unified state identity. Even the state's populations are largely transplanted -- one in four Californians was born somewhere else. (Starr, 2001)

The diversity of these images can be partly attributed to the hugeness of the state of course. Its geographic and historical diversity as a territory drew Americans from the far reaches of the nation as early as the Gold Rush of 1843. However, this diversity is best exemplified between the contrast between Northern and Southern California. Even the state's fabled beaches from its Northern to its Southern stretches are extremely different. Along California's north coast, "cove or pocket beaches are common where the granite and basaltic rock that composes the sea cliffs has been sculpted by prevailing northwesterly winds and battered by high energy waves over millions of years." In Southern California, beaches often consist of "long ribbons of sand" dispersed through widely separated rocky points. "The bluffs of easily eroded shales and sandstones that edge the coast here continuously crumble away, creating on even coastline over time." ("California's Beaches." (2004) California Coastal Resource Guide) Southern beaches, one might say, appropriately enough, are more protected and are less open to the community because of these geographical manifestations and rocky walls.

But the distinctions between Northern and Southern California are more than purely geographical in nature. According to avowedly conservative libertarian historian Steve Sailer, New Englanders of Puritan descent fled to the North. Middle Westerners with social roots in Quaker Pennsylvania formed the population of Southern California. Even as the state grew more settled after the gold rush, sharp cultural distinctions remained between North and South, for all the diffusion of new American, and later foreign immigrants. (Sailer, 2004).

According to Sailer, Northern California, rather than becoming a "1950s paradise of the common man" instead shifted to a high-cost economy. Ironically, some of the reasons for keeping the economic cost of life so precipitous and prohibitive to many Americans were for 'liberal' reasons. "Ferociously powerful unions kept wages high. Stringent aesthetic restrictions and large amounts of land devoted to parks kept drove up property values. (Sailer, 2004) This was, in reaction, to the "hydraulic mining washed into the rivers of Northern California an avalanche of debris that choked waterways and flooded farmlands with oily ooze." (Starr, 2004) Southern California, in contrast, was not "heavily unionized" or environmentally motivated. Politically, this area of California was much more conservative, "as the popularity of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan testify." (Sailer, 2004) This popularity of conservative politicians in the area reached its epitome, some say, actually in the 1970's, when property tax revolt spawned the popular movement to pass Proposition 13, dramatically slashing taxes usually earmarked for education. Southern California, particularly Reagan's area of residence, was seen as the motivating force behind the Proposition's placement on the ballot.

Yet, despite the conservative nature of tax revolt, and the largely wealthy voices behind Proposition 13, one could also argue that there is a rough capitalist democracy to advancing such a grass-roots movement that has its parallels with 'the Summer of Love.' In other words, in California, Southern or Northern, there is a strong independence of spirit in both the conservative as well as the liberal political movements in both Northern and Southern areas of the state. Governor Reagan in the 1960's came to office as a political outsider, albeit a Republican, then a Goldwater Republican from a controversial wing of the party. The state's current Republican is also famously a political outsider, and came to office through a similarly grass roots referendum.

California, liberal and conservative, North and South, has thus always remained on the national 'cutting edge of politics.' As early 1878, the California Constitution had been significantly re-written to cope with an era of social readjustment and strife that had brought the Workingmen's Party into power in Sacramento that foreshadowed much of the 1930's New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. (Starr, 2004) But, some have alleged, the paradox of Californian growth and restriction remains, as the public transportation system remains woefully inadequate, leaving most Californians more dependant upon car transpiration than virtually any other metropolitan state in the union.