Thus a camera view of California. The surfing boys and leggy girls, the hikers and farmers and futurists, the kooks and the activists are all part of the scene—arbitrarily chosen parts, some more valid than others, but all typical and yet unique. The force that binds them together, the soul of California, is the search for a better life carried on by 20 million individuals, a tenth of the U.S. population. The will-o'-the-wisp—Californism—propels the matron to the massage parlor, impels the petitioner or protester to demonstrate against smog or close a campus in the name of students' rights. It fuels the rage of the blacks and the Chicanos and the newly militant Chinese, who are all more conscious than minorities anywhere else of deprivation in the midst of fantastic plenty. It is the fear of losing their place in the sun that leads middle-class Californians to vote for a Ronald Reagan or a Sam Yorty.
Most of the trends that have recently and radically changed California life are familiar in the other America —though many first came to prominence in California. They include the hippie movement, the pop-drug culture, widespread sexual permissiveness, campus revolt and, since the Watts explosion in 1965, more virulent ghetto riots. They also include, in reaction to much of this, a political swing to the right. Not to mention pollution of all kinds and the resulting concern for salvaging the threatened environment.
A thousand Americans a day become Californians. They come West with high expectations that the wealth, the welcoming land, the easy ambience, the astonishing diversity of opportunity will all provide something far different from the dull sublunary routine of most mortals. To many of them, indeed, the new setting does mean an end to the grim struggle for existence, the beginning of a life that frees emotional energies for the pursuit of self.
Once they arrive—hardly anyone "settles"—no familial or community traditions bind them. "That's why we have so many nuts out here," says Los Angeles Pollster Don Muchmore. "People come and do things here that they wouldn't normally do back home because such behavior is unacceptable. They don't want to answer to the neighbors. They want the independence of being who they are and what they are, when they want to. It's a sort of Paradise situation."
Officially, Paradise opened for business in July, 1769, when Father Junípero Serra, alias Charlton Heston, planted the Cross at San Diego, establishing California's first mission. This year the state is celebrating its bicentennial with dutiful if lackluster civic ceremonies. Fortunately, perhaps, most Californians are too busy having fun to pause for renditions of their state song:
I love you California.
You're the greatest state of all:
I love you in the winter.
Summer, spring and in the fall.
The men who followed Serra to California were lusty freebooters (Puritans, for some reason, had little zest for Ēl Dorado). The trait they shared was an ability to build what Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. approvingly called "a special brand of democracy, one based on the notion that the best good of all was served by everyone looking out for himself."