California’s woes were born in England The state is torn between clashing Anglo traditions

We can start by tracing its roots to medieval England. In his 1989 book, Albion’s Seed, the historian David Hackett Fischer describes four distinct American political traditions that originated in four waves of migration to the New World, each from different regions of England. The most famous of these groups were the Puritans from East Anglia, who believed in community and the power of the state. Then there were the “Scots-Irish” from the Scottish-English borderlands, who shunned any form of authority whatsoever. Together, these two groups would come to shape the politics of contemporary California.

The Puritans who sailed into Massachusetts Bay in the early 17th century were pious middle-class artisans and yeoman farmers fleeing religious persecution in England. Their leaders dreamed of establishing a Christian utopia in America. The Puritans had a bleak view of humanity. They believed in Original Sin, and in mankind’s infinite capacity for evil. But this cynicism was offset by their reverence for community, through which people could be steered toward godliness. Their faith in the common good manifested itself in the town hall, a centuries-old institution that the Puritans brought from the Old Country. Every adult male could participate in a town meeting, where the goal was to achieve consensus, rather than a mere majority. New England townships voted for high taxation, and their level of public spending was two-to-four times that of other North American colonies.

All this meant that the modern American understanding of “liberty” was alien in Puritan New England, where individual rights were not really rights at all, but privileges bestowed by the commonwealth. Puritans spoke not of liberty, but of liberties: discrete permissions granted by the government, such as the liberty to fish in a particular river. Fischer describes these liberties as “specific exemptions from a condition of prior restraint”, suggesting that the natural state was one of state discipline, not personal freedom. In other words, it was the role of the government to regulate the behaviour of its citizens, not vice versa.

In the centuries that followed, the Puritan social ideal would spread from New England across the continent and become one of the foundational elements of American politics. This was no accident: the Puritans believed it was their God-ordained duty to expand Christian civilisation and save lost souls. Their evangelical spirit became part of the secular worldview of the Yankees.

This worldview would eventually come to embed itself in California. The Yankees were the first Americans to explore the Pacific Coast by ship, as fur traders. They feared that, without their spiritual example, California would be lost to the Catholicism of French rival fur trappers and Spanish-speaking “Californios”. That threat only grew with the discovery of gold in 1848, as Americans flocked West seeking anything but Christian enlightenment. Yankee ministers began preaching against the Gold Rush in New England, discouraging their kinfolk from making the trek; then, they took to the road themselves, spreading the Word in the saloons and brothels of California. By 1849, almost half of the vessels docked in San Francisco’s port had arrived from New England.

The Yankee elite dreamed of turning California into a Massachusetts on the Pacific, and New Englanders into “the founding race of California”, in the words of the historian Kevin Starr. They went about founding civilising institutions, through which they could assert their influence. New Englanders poured money into new Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches all over San Francisco. They founded the city’s public school system. Across the Bay, they established the College of California, which would later become the University of California at Berkeley. But while the Yankees dominated the state’s emerging cultural establishment, they did not make up a majority of California’s population. This meant they were denied the political hegemony they had achieved in the Northern states, from Boston to Minneapolis.

According to the US Census, less than 30% of Californians in 1860 were born in Yankee-dominated states. A third were born in California, and about an equal number were born in states populated by what the writer Colin Woodard calls “Greater Appalachia”. And so the ideology of California came to be shaped by two very different migrant cultures: the Yankees and the Scots-Irish emigrants of Greater Appalachia.

Unlike the community-minded Puritans, the Scots-Irish were fierce defenders of personal liberty. Their love of freedom was born in the rugged borderlands between England and Scotland, a contested region of unremitting warfare throughout the Middle Ages. Vicious military raids on behalf of a stream of duelling Scottish and English monarchs were a routine part of life. The poor grew used to watching their homes razed to the ground, their family members tortured or killed. Without a government to lean on, families aligned themselves into warrior clans and waged blood feuds to settle disputes. So despised were the inhabitants of this border region that in the 16th century the parliaments of both Scotland and England passed a law declaring that “All Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock.”

In the 17th century, with the two kingdoms unified under James VI, the borderlands were finally pacified through a campaign of state-sanctioned mass murder. Many of the borderland’s ruffians headed to Ireland, from where they were banished once again to the colonies. Many more fled voluntarily, seeking freedom in America.

These fugitives arrived primarily through the port of Philadelphia, but quickly fled to the backcountry. In the mountains and hollows of the Appalachian wilderness, they could at last enjoy their independence — and continue in their violent folkways. Fischer describes one traditional Scots-Irish “rough and tumble” match between a Kentuckian and a West Virginian. Even after the Virginian gouged out the eyes of the Kentuckian, Fischer narrates, the struggle continued. The Virginian fastened his teeth on the Kentuckian’s nose and bit it in two. Then he tore off the Kentuckian’s ears. At last, the “Kentuckian, deprived of eyes, ears and nose, gave in”.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, as America drove relentlessly West, the Scots-Irish acted as the new nation’s advance guard. Instead of waiting for the US military to defeat the Indians before moving onto their land, as the Yankees did, the backcountry settlers waged war upon the natives by themselves. They were driven, however, less by a desire to expand American civilisation than to escape it. Fleeing the government’s encroachment upon the frontier, they pushed West — and eventually wound up in California, Oregon, and Washington.

They brought their belligerent folkways with them. California in the 19th century was one of the most violent places on the continent. As the historian Elliott West has noted, this was a period of racial re-ordering in the state, during which Anglo-Americans asserted their place at the top of the hierarchy. In the middle decades of that century, lynchings in California — of Hispanic Californios, principally — were at least as common as lynchings of black people in the Jim Crow South. In 1854, the murder rate in Los Angeles was 56 times that of New York City.

As on the Atlantic seaboard, the Scots-Irish settled in the mountains and valleys rather than in the coastal port cities. To this day, their individualistic worldview continues to shape the politics of rural California, with its populist agrarian politics, its small-government conservatism, and its distrust of the coast-dwelling liberal elite. But their influence wasn’t limited to the inland regions. The Scots-Irish pioneers infused California’s hegemonic brand of progressivism — which one might describe as fundamentally Yankee — with a touch of backcountry libertarianism, and in doing so, transformed the politics of the state.

Perhaps the clearest example of this ideological fusion was the apotheosis of California progressivism: the Sixties. The closest the Yankees ever got to uncontested national political power was the New Deal era, which brought the entire country into alignment with the Yankee vision of liberty. Yet the Sixties saw a generation of young people seek to dismantle the social and political machinery that the New Deal had built — and that spark was lit on the campus of that hallowed Yankee institution, the University of California, Berkeley.

The Berkeley student revolutionaries were inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, but after facing resistance to their civil rights activism from university administrators, their cause transformed into something more personal. The University of California system was the pinnacle of Yankee social engineering: a massive, egalitarian government institution that transformed the individual into the ideal citizen. Against the backdrop of Jim Crow and then the Vietnam War, however, that system became odious to the post-materialist, middle-class agitators of the New Left. Mario Savio’s plea in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in 1964 was an explicit rejection of Yankee social conformity:

“Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be […] made into any product! Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organised labour, be they anyone! We’re human beings!”

Over the next decade, Berkeley’s libertarian strain became ever more central to the evolving counterculture. Activists resisted not just the politics and the mass industrial economic structures of the era, but mainstream American culture altogether. They grew their hair, renounced all forms of authority, and eventually fled the cities to establish self-sufficient agricultural cooperatives in the countryside. In this, they followed the well-worn path of the Scots-Irish settlers of the Appalachian backcountry. The conservative, rural Californian communities that those settlers had established a century before may have had little affection for their new hippy neighbours, but they were, in fact, animated by the same American spirit and the same animosity for Yankee authoritarianism.

As the New Left faded in the Seventies, its anti-establishment zeal was absorbed into Silicon Valley’s startup culture, and into a distinctly West Coast style of progressivism. This is reflected in liberal California’s instinctive contempt for the police, its high tolerance for visible social disorder, its celebration of cultural non-conformity, and its theatrical embrace of hedonism, all of which are antithetical to the Puritan ideal. At the same time, Californian progressivism has retained its Yankee predilection for top-down social regulation, government activism, moral surveillance, and cultural evangelism.

From time to time, as in the Sixties, this ideological hybrid yields a politics that is vital and new. But more often, it manifests as a distinctively dysfunctional kind of progressive politics that sets the state apart from its Yankee cousins. There is no better example of this than the way that the state manages its mental health crisis. California once ran a vast Department of Mental Hygiene, but in 1967, shocked by conditions in its 14 asylums, state legislators all but banned involuntary commitment of the insane in a law they characterised as a “Magna Carta” for California’s mentally ill. In doing so, the state swung from an excess of Yankee-style social control to the opposite extreme: a hardcore civil libertarian regime that has left the mentally ill languishing on city sidewalks. This right to suffer from drug addiction and psychosis on the street without intervention from the government may constitute “freedom” in the Scots-Irish backcountry, but a traditional Yankee would not recognise it as such.

Drug policy is another case-in-point. California’s libertarian attitude toward recreational drug use began in the Sixties. Today, its ramifications can be seen in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and South of Market districts and Skid Row in Los Angeles, where not only drug use but open drug dealing is decriminalised, in part as a result of Proposition 47, a progressive ballot initiative that California voters passed in 2014. In San Francisco’s influential activist circles, drug-dealing is hardly considered a crime at all, and drug enforcement is deemed an act of state repression against the poor. The assumption, which would be right at home in the Appalachian backcountry, is that the government is nothing more than a malign apparatus of coercion. Those same activists, however, also believe in the government’s responsibility to provide expansive services and treatment to those who want it — reflecting the political philosophy of colonial New England.

The result of this inscrutable ideology is a state that fails to fulfil the most elementary obligation of government: the provision of basic social order. You see it everywhere in California, in the tent encampments that line the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica and the dusty sidewalks of Fresno and Bakersfield. California is where two fundamentally incompatible Anglo traditions merged, yielding a unique kind of social dysfunction that’s as indelible a part of the state as the coastal cliffs and the redwood forests.

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Leighton Woodhouse is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Oakland, California.

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