Post World War II California

World War II brought heavy industry to California, in the form of munitions factories, shipyards, and airplane manufacturing. In the 1950s, California in general, and San Francisco in particular, became popular with artists and intellectuals. The so-called Beat Generation appeared, which later inspired alternative-culture groups — most notably the flower children of the 1960s — in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. During the Summer of Love in 1967, as the war in Vietnam escalated, student protests increased at Berkeley and elsewhere in California, as they did across the country. A year later, amid rising racial tensions, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, setting off riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles and in other cities. Soon thereafter, Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot in Los Angeles after winning the California Democratic Party presidential primary. Antiwar protests continued into the 1970s. Perhaps in response to an increasingly violent society, the 1970s also gave rise to several exotic religions and cults, which found eager adherents in California. The spiritual New Age continued into the 1980s, along with a growing population, environmental pollution, and escalating social ills, especially in Los Angeles. Real-estate values soared, the computer industry — centered in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco —boomed, and banks and businesses prospered.
The late 1980s and early 1990s, however, brought a devastating recession to the state. Los Angeles stayed perpetually in the news, thanks to grave issues such as the race riots spurred by a videotaping and subsequent acquittal of four white police officers beating black motorist Rodney King, along with ultimately trivial if captivating ones like the O.J. Simpson murder case and other celebrity peccadilloes. Two years later, a major earthquake caused billions of dollars in damage to L.A. and left thousands injured and homeless, while Oakland’s hills became a raging inferno, killing 26 people and destroying 3,000 homes. Midway through the 1990s, the U.S. economy slowly began to improve, a welcome relief to recession-battered Californians. Crime and unemployment began to drop, while public schools received millions for muchneeded improvements. Computer- and Internet-related industries flourished in the Bay Area, with entrepreneurialism fueling much of the growth. As the stock market continued its record-setting pace, no state reaped more benefits than California, which was gaining new millionaires by the day. At the millennium, optimism in the state’s economy and quality of life was at an all-time high.
At the turn of the century, the economy was still strong, the unemployment rate still low, and property rates still rising. Then came some outof-the-blue sucker punches to California’s rosy economy, including the rapid demise of many, if not most, of the dot-coms in the stock-market slump and an energy deregulation scheme gone awry, leaving irate residents with periodic rolling blackouts and escalating energy bills. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the following national trauma and economic downturn hit California hard.
And just when things seemed to be getting back to normal, along came the 2003 recall effort to oust Governor Gray Davis, launching California politics into the national news limelight as Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzenegger unseated the unpopular politician. Not to be outdone, the following year San Francisco elected a 36-year-old supervisor, Gavin Newsom, as mayor. He quickly made national headlines by authorizing city hall to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He even performed a few of the unions. Six months later, the state supreme court invalidated 3,955 gay marriages. California: It’s like that. It may be many things, but boring is never one of them.