Stephanie S. Pincetl. Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use and Development. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xix + 372 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-6110-9.

Reviewed by David Vaught (Department of History, Texas A&M University)
Published on H-California (August, 2000)

History and Public Policy

This is an ambitious book. Stephanie S. Pincetl, research associate professor of geography and coordinator of the Sustainable Cities Program at the University of Southern California, analyzes urban development, agriculture, water use, forest management, and wildlife and fisheries in California from statehood to the present. Over that century and a half, visions of honest government, empowered citizens, small farms up and down the Central Valley, preserved wilderness, and controlled urban growth have abounded. Rarely have those visions been translated into policy, however. In fact, political corruption, alienated voters, corporate farms, environmental catastrophe, and little agreement on what growth even means have predominated. Huge Spanish land grants helped launch California in the wrong direction right off the bat, Pincetl notes. But ultimately and with considerable irony, she argues, Progressive-era reforms -- some well-intentioned but misguided, others downright crooked -- have stifled policy, wreaked havoc on the environment, and indeed crippled democracy in the Golden State.

As a call to arms, this is a powerful book. Members of this list will be familiar with much of the subject matter. But the sheer force of the broad range of topics especially in the latter two-thirds of the book that covers the post-World War II period will stagger even the most politically informed reader. In about one hundred and seventy pages, Pincetl addresses a number of complex issues. She describes the massive (and largely unchecked) suburban growth in southern California and the Bay Area, and the deforestation and urbanization of Lake Tahoe. Also included are the Santa Barbara oil spill, various attempts to preserve the state's redwoods, the California spotted owl, agricultural labor, political reapportionment, the rise and fall of Jerry Brown, the Peripheral Canal, Proposition 13, the 1965 Watts rebellion, and the 1992 LA riots.

Heroic efforts by the Sierra Club, Local Agency Formation Commissions, regional Councils of Government, California Tomorrow, and a host of citizen-led initiatives have been unable to make much political headway. Why? Pincetl's explanation is that special interests and government commissions, both dominated by big business, have had a stranglehold on policy. The very structure of the political system puts "the state's police power (its authority to enact and enforce legislation) at the service of powerful economic interests" and, in effect, "out of reach of the ordinary citizen" (p. xv). Thus, even issues like smog in Sequoia National Park, which virtually everyone abhors, get lost in a "Hobbesian war" among political and economic interest groups battling it out for a piece of "an ever-shrinking pie" (p. 303). By book's end, few will question Pincetl's conclusion that in California today government is in a state of gridlock, the environment is on a path toward destruction, and citizens are gripped by cynicism.

As history, however, the book is less successful. Although she does not say it explicitly or cite any of its principal proponents, Pincetl appears to buy into the "corporate liberal" school of modern American politics.[1] The current state of affairs in California, she maintains, stems from a "perverse legacy" (p. xvii) of the Progressive era though which, their rhetoric notwithstanding, early twentieth-century reformers actually created a regulatory government of business, by business, and for business. Here, the initiative, referendum, and recall are central to her argument. While intended to take power away from political parties (and their bosses) and give it back to the people, these reforms instead put a premium on organization, money, and expertise -- attributes not of citizens at large but of well-organized special interest groups. Moreover, progressives, in their zeal to apply scientific management to government, established scores of boards and commissions dominated by businessmen who, much more often than not, became the main beneficiaries of state regulation. A "political ideology" became firmly entrenched, and it has been all-downhill ever since.

Too pat? Too simple? Pincetl admits as much in the introduction (p. xii), yet she reiterates the thesis chapter by chapter, section by section. Mere repetition, however, does not make it convincing. Not one of Pincetl's case studies is based on primary sources despite the fact that many of the government institutions she analyzes have left behind voluminous records at the California State Archives and elsewhere. And while she characterizes her research strategy as "synthetic" (p. xii), it is more a matter of picking and choosing from a select number of secondary sources, many of which (Paul Gates, George Mowry, Carey McWilliams, and Paul Taylor, for example) are far removed from the cutting edge of scholarship. On more current issues, Pincetl picks up the pace of the book and writes with considerably more verve, but she still relies much more on what others say than on original research.

Does this matter? That depends on one's perspective. Among political scientists, geographers, and policy-oriented scholars, there may be little cause for alarm. A cautionary bell will likely ring in the ears of many a historian, however. Problems of bias, distortion, and oversight lurk in the shadows of this sort of analysis. Few historians, for example, believe any longer in the single progressive "ideology" or "movement" at the core of Pincetl's argument. There was no single constituency or agenda among reformers; people who were progressive on one issue were often conservative on another.[2] This was true even of California businessmen, who were never the monolithic bloc that Pincetl makes them out to be.[3] And surprisingly World War I, generally regarded as the driving force behind government-business cooperation[4], receives no attention whatsoever. Indeed, the book's title notwithstanding, this is less a "history" of policy and politics and more an exhortation of the author's cause. The function of history, Pincetl believes, is to "provide context . . . to understand the present" (p. xiii) to use it as a tool for solving contemporary problems. She is, of course, not the first scholar to create a useable past to explain a disturbing present. This was the dominant mode of historical inquiry in the first half of the twentieth century among "progressive" historians, the intellectual counterparts to the "misguided" reformers in Pincetl's narrative.

In the end, the book's lack of historical rigor undermines much of its effectiveness. Most readers will agree that California is in big trouble. But the book's lack of nuance and complexity may cause it to fall flat. True believers will no doubt applaud the solutions that Pincetl proposes in her conclusion to foster a more democratic government: eliminate interest-group-based boards and commissions, non-partisan local elections, and special districts; build new parties with higher standards of accountability; establish strict limits on campaign expenditures; overhaul the tax system; remove the two-third majority requirement to pass a state budget; and emphasize regional government and land-use coordination. But Pincetl may only be preaching to the converted. Skeptics, after all, will have to point no further than to her own analysis of politics in California to suggest that such solutions are unattainable, even pie in the sky. The unintended result is one of profound pessimism.

Notes

[1]. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); R. Jeffrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

[2]. Daniel T. Rodgers, "In Search of Progressivism," Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 113-132.

[3]. William Issel, "'Citizens Outside the Government': Business and Urban Policy in San Francisco and Los Angeles, 1890-1932," Pacific Historical Review 57 (May 1988): 117-145.

[4]. See, for example, Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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Citation: David Vaught. Review of Pincetl, Stephanie S., Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use and Development. H-California, H-Net Reviews. August, 2000.
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