This is the General Sherman, the largest tree in the world.
Here in the Sequoia National Park of California.
It's not the tallest tree in the world, that's
in the Redwoods National Park of California.
It's not the oldest tree in the world, that's in the Inyo National Forest of California.
For the record, California is also home
to the world's biggest pine cone.
In terms of natural superlatives, California is home
to some of the most astonishing natural wonders on the planet.
It has the highest waterfall, the hottest spot
and the deepest canyon in North America.
So you have to ask yourself, how can a place
with so much breathtaking beauty
spawn an addled twit like Miley Cyrus?
MUSIC: "California Sun" by The Rivieras
When Miley Cyrus packed up her hillbilly skank trunk
and sidled off to California in search of stardom,
she was just emulating the long line of no-hopers, down-and-outers,
dreamers, prospectors, robber barons, missionaries,
rheumatics, asthmatics, snake-oil salesmen, refugees
and human detritus who bought into the idea
that California was the pot at the end of the rainbow.
Since its birth, California more than any other US state
has always believed it was the maker of dreams and legends.
California entered history as a myth.
New York, New Hampshire and New Jersey
are named after British place names,
the Carolinas and Maryland after British royalty,
Nebraska, Illinois after Indian tribes.
California was named after a giant woman.
Calafia was a mythical pagan warrior queen who first appeared
in a 15th-century fantasy novel called The Adventures Of Esplandian.
In the novel,
Calafia rules an island inhabited entirely by Amazon women.
She raises an army of female warriors
and sails away from her island, called California,
and then, armed with a killer flock of trained griffins, enters a battle
between Muslims and Christians who are defending Constantinople.
At the Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim,
Calafia, an Amazon woman,
was portrayed by the 5' 4" Whoopi Goldberg.
The attraction was called Golden Dreams,
designed to teach tourists the history of California.
Well, the excitement was palpable.
Golden Dreams was demolished in July 2009
to make way for the construction of a really scary ride
called The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure.
And that's California in a nutshell.
A place that's always been willing to instantly forget its past
so that it can recreate it for tourists and dreamers.
Its state flower is the poppy - an opiate -
so really, what do you expect of its people?
♪ I'd like to rest my heavy head tonight
♪ On a bed of California stars
♪ I'd like to lay my weary bones tonight
♪ On a bed of California stars
♪ I'd love to feel your hand touching mine
♪ And tell me why I must keep working on
♪ Yes, I'd give my life
♪ To lay my head tonight on a bed. ♪
Virtue and vice is all there is, there's no other story.
John Steinbeck said that.
You remember John Steinbeck.
He was the influential American writer whose career was cut short
by a crazed assassin named Michael Gove.
Steinbeck mined the underside of California, its broken promise,
and most of the impressionable writing, art and music since then
has been by people who either lost faith in the place
or never had it to begin with.
The stories of Charles Bukowski and Raymond Chandler.
The poetry of Allen Ginsberg and the City Lights poets.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
Starving hysterical naked...
The music of Tom Waits.
♪ Liar, liar with your pants on fire... ♪
The films of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Wait a minute. I've just confused artistic merit with celebrity hood.
How did that happen?
Well, it's easy if you apply the California standard of human quality.
In 2003, Schwarzenegger ran for Governor of California
against Cruz Bustamente.
Let's compare credentials.
Bustamente was California's Lieutenant Governor at the time.
He had an inside understanding of California politics.
Schwarzenegger was once Mr Junior Europe.
Bustamente had a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cal State, Fresno.
But he didn't look good in a unitard.
Bustamente was the highest-ranking Latino office-holder in the United States,
but Schwarzenegger had landed the coveted role
of T-800 Model 101 in Terminator.
Human quality isn't even a virtue in California.
Humans occupy places like Sherman Oaks or Tarzana.
If you achieve god-like status, you can occupy the Governor's mansion
or the White House, and in order to achieve god-like status,
you only need to have appeared in at least three B movies.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is coming your way,
magnificent as Hercules!
The story begins quietly enough, high atop fabled Mount Olympus.
Hercules annoys Zeus just once too often with his need for adventure.
I'm tired of the same old faces, the same old things.
It's an easy place to exaggerate.
The fact that they named the territory after the goddess Calafia.
That didn't happen anywhere else.
Right. It was very easy to translate all that into mythological image.
Arnold Schwarzenegger - he's totally awesome.
That's what this town has always been,
Greek mythology with pictures.
You see, the California stars have all the same desires
and longings as us, but they have the clout to do something about it.
So they're both human and immortal.
We are entering the Garden of Legends? Garden of Legends.
That is the area of the cemetery
that's probably most heavily populated
with famous people from the film industry.
The building on the right is the cathedral mausoleum,
where our probably most legendary resident lies,
Rudolph Valentino.
Cecil B DeMille and his family,
a memorial to the director Tony Scott.
Douglas Fairbanks right next to Johnny Ramone.
That's Alfalfa, from the Little Rascals.
He had a very tragic end.
He was stabbed in a knife fight, over, like, 50 bucks. Really?
Only in California can immortality be anointed.
Barring that, it can be purchased.
So we make video biographies of everybody,
not just of famous people, and we take it very seriously,
and some people will do basically instalments from their entire lives.
And what would something like this cost?
The biographies start at about $3,500
for one chapter, and then each chapter after that.
Each chapter is probably about eight to ten minutes long.
We do also offer broadcasting,
live webcasting of funeral services.
That's always been California's greatest trick -
its promise of immortality, fame, wealth or a better life
by merely setting your foot across a state line.
If you look at California history over the centuries,
it's this series of waves of people coming here
to improve their lives.
From the very beginning, it was so Eden-like
in its properties, and so full of possibility,
and then the gold rush - wham!
And from that point forward, it was just the land of dreams.
It's gold. It's gold!
Before the discovery of gold,
the West was a vast plains in need of people.
It would be a place called Coloma, 140 miles east of San Francisco,
that two men would make a single discovery that would instigate
the largest global migration in American history.
On the morning of January 24th 1848,
a man named James Marshall was inspecting the flutter wheel
on the tailrace of a sawmill on the American River.
I don't know what any of those words meant.
But the mill was owned by a man named John Sutter.
Marshall was his foreman.
Marshall looked down in the water, saw something gleaming,
about the size of a pea,
picked it up, inspected it, then took it back
and showed it to his workers.
They couldn't have cared less.
They were being paid a dollar a day, guaranteed wage.
Marshall took the nugget to Sutter himself. Sutter tested it
and realised it was indeed gold.
Well, you can imagine what happened after that.
Nothing.
No-one was willing to give much credence to a pair
of mud-caked mill-workers.
But, for some reason, when the news hit San Francisco,
the shit hit the fan.
In May of that year, a Mormon merchant named Sam Brannan
raced through the streets of San Francisco on horseback yelling,
"Gold, gold, gold from the American River!"
Within two days, two-thirds of the city of San Francisco was deserted.
Physicians walked away from their patients,
sailors deserted their ships.
The military chief of the army resigned, grabbed a pick,
a shovel, a mule, and headed for the American River.
One of the great mysteries of the California gold rush
is how no-one would believe people like Sutter and Marshall,
who had an understanding of hydrology and minerals,
but when a Mormon - a Mormon! -
a guy who believes that if you're black and convert to Mormonism
you'll turn white,
a guy who believes that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri,
a guy who believes that if you wear flip-flops in church
you'll go to hell, that Satan has control over the ocean -
so don't go swimming - a guy who believes that a baby in the womb
is technically in Heaven,
a guy who believes that you could start a religion by claiming
to have found 18 gold tablets but then somehow "lost" them...
Yeah, when a person believes in that and says, "Gold,"
people go fucking nuts.
The news spread rapidly.
Some made the hazardous trip,
moving swiftly over the plains in covered wagons.
Others took the long journey in sailing vessels,
going down the coast of South America around Cape Horn.
As news of the gold fever spread,
it turned California into a truly global frontier.
The word got out on the ships,
and so the Chileans, South Americans, people from Mexico, they came.
The word got to China, and they overran everything.
Sutter has a diary, and it's interesting.
"More people coming, heading for the mountains.
"More people coming."
Then in May of 1848,
remember gold was discovered in January,
by May he stops keeping the diary, he's just been overrun.
Within 12 months, over 100,000 grizzled gold-seeking prospectors
came to stake their claim.
So this is what caused the fever,
and it truly is beautiful.
You can imagine how addictive it would be
to be chasing something this lovely.
Wow. Is this the way they would find it in the river?
No. What they were finding in the river were little nuggets,
and they looked sort of like brass, they didn't have this sparkle.
Sometimes it was just dust and that's why they would have to take a pan
into the river and they would just wash it around
and the tiny, tiny flakes would separate from the black sand.
♪ I've travelled all over this country
♪ Prospecting and digging for gold... ♪
They stood knee-deep in icy water all day, filling a pan with dirt,
lowering it into the water, sifting through it or packing it in and out
by wagon. They slept in the cold and damp,
they ate bacon or sourdough bread,
fought pneumonia and dysentery, and every time more people showed up,
they had to wander off and find a new spot to dig.
The work was so hard.
And if you worked all day, you might make the equivalent of one ounce,
which would be worth about $16,
which would buy you a couple of dinners.
♪ For each man who got rich by mining
♪ Perceiving that hundreds grew poor... ♪
The truth is there was no guarantee of success for these prospectors.
They could be panning and digging for months and find nothing at all,
but that's the essence of the California spirit.
Come on and try your luck.
Few of the miners had any knowledge of geology or hydraulics,
but quite often there would be these gold-mining fortune-telling machines
at every camp where you merely put in 50 cents
and they would tell you whether or not you were going to find gold.
I have seen the greatest minds of my generation
destroyed by insanity,
naked, starving...
It was the irresistible temptation of striking the mother lode
that kept people coming to California,
and as more migrants came, towns sprang up and cities grew.
The transformation was unbelievable,
because we went from a few tents on the sand dunes in 1848.
Five years later, you've got one of the major cities.
You've got a state. It was bountiful.
California was flourishing, but it wasn't because
the prospectors were finding their dreams.
Most of the people who made money in the gold rush
didn't do it by sifting through mud.
They were the people who sold the shovels, who ran the hotels,
the boarding houses, the hardware stores and the whorehouses.
All those in favour of bringing prostitution to this camp
say aye!
ALL: Aye!
In 1849, a state constitution was written.
A governor and a legislature were chosen,
and a year later, California became a state.
The Golden State, they called it.
The state is based on this illusion of gold, right?
Created the whole romantic image of California,
this is where you want to be, this is where opportunity is,
where the sunshine is. Where you can reach out your bedroom window
and grab an orange off your orange tree in the middle of December.
It's all based on a lie.
The gold rush dispersed the Native American population of California.
Within ten years, it was one-fifth the population it was in 1849.
Americans loathed the presence of any other race,
they believed that the gold was just for them.
That's what the gold rush did. It destroyed that agrarian ethos,
that sense of virtue, that Protestant work ethic.
Just cashed it in for a fly-by-night, get-rich-quick,
something-for-nothing worship of the almighty dollar
that's pretty much been the backbone of American society ever since.
In 1846, a congressman named Charles Cathcart from Indiana
stood on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington DC
and invoked the following statement.
"The Iron Horse, on the wings of the wind,
"his nostrils distended with flame, salamander-like, vomiting fire
"and smoke, trembling with power, yet made subservient to the steel
"curb imposed upon him by the hand of man, flies across the continent
"in less time than it took our ancestry to visit a neighbouring city."
And with that short, succinct statement, a mania was born -
to build a railroad to connect two oceans.
A railroad uniting America's east and west coast
was needed now more than ever.
It was decided two companies would build it,
one from the east and one from the west.
America was a giant pair of trousers,
and the 2,000 miles of track would be the belt holding it up.
But there was one major obstacle, the Sierra Nevada mountains,
the highest peaks in continental America.
One man thought he could do it, Theodore Judah.
Now, Judah was a civil engineer so unlike the fat cats back east,
he actually knew a thing or two about building railroads
because he'd built railroads before.
He surveyed the Sierra mountains and concluded that, conceivably,
the railroad could come through here, Donner Pass.
6,400 feet high.
If the name Donner rings a bell, it's because it's the most
notable incidence of cannibalism in American history.
17 years before construction of the transcontinental railroad,
a group of pioneers set off from Springfield, Illinois, for California.
22 men, women and children broke off from the main group
to take an ill-advised short cut.
This group would be known as the "Donner party".
The Donner party got stranded in 20-foot snowdrifts
and slowly realising they were going to perish,
resorted to cannibalism. Who knows what really happened?
Given the vagaries of strangers travelling together,
it's possible that some of the pioneers had been snacking
on their companions as far back as Wyoming.
I'll leave it to you to draw conclusions on how California
induces a certain kind of cut-throat mentality on its people.
All I'm saying is, these people were in Nevada,
they got each other's back.
Soon as they cross into California, they start eating each other.
The point is, the Donner pass was a formidable obstacle.
Judah believed it could be conquered.
He just needed some backers and, in 1861,
he succeeded in bringing together four men who would turn out
to be the biggest crooks in American history.
And when I say "crooks", I mean the kind of scheming, conniving,
four-flushing, profligate, cut-throat, slimeball varlets,
scullions and mountebanks that would make the average crook
run to a dictionary to look up what those words mean.
Mark Hopkins, a failed miner who had opted to open a grocery store.
Charles Crocker, failed miner, now a dry goods merchant.
Leland Stanford, failed miner, now a lawyer and general store owner.
And Collis Huntington, who hadn't even bothered to fail at mining.
He owned a hardware store.
On the evening of November 9 1860,
Huntington, Hopkins, Crocker and Stanford met upstairs
at this Sacramento hardware store owned by Collis Huntington.
Theodore Judah laid out his plans, and the men agreed to back him.
They were bonded by this realisation
that there is an opportunity
to stop being merchants and become extremely, extremely rich men.
These four men, who became known as the Associates,
invested a total of $7,000 in the venture.
They formed the Central Pacific Railroad and started selling stock
in an enterprise which to this point was nothing but an idea on paper.
Leland Stanford ran for office and managed to get himself
elected Governor of California -
not too much of a conflict of interest there(!)
So with bags full of cash, the Associates set out to win
the contract to build the western section of the railroad.
What ensued was textbook Karl Marx capitalism.
The government pretends to be neutral in order to maintain order,
while unfailingly serving the interest of the rich.
Collis Huntington went to Washington
and, for $200,000, bribed a contract.
The US government gave the Central Pacific Railroad -
that is four guys with beards
who called themselves the Central Pacific Railroad -
access to over nine million acres of land.
These men would have the right of way for up to 200 yards
on either side of the railroad. Sweet!
The government gave them over $100 million to start building
the railroad and, on top of that, agreed to pay them
$16,000 per mile over flat lands, $32,000 per mile over hill terrain
and $48,000 per mile through the mountains.
Leland Stanford went out and hired a crooked surveyor
who immediately concluded that hilly terrain started
just east of Sacramento, altitude 30 feet.
When Theodore Judah realised that his idea
was being turned into a major scam,
he decided to pay the Associates their money back
and reclaim his idea.
He headed off to New York by boat, via the Isthmus of Panama,
to find some new investors.
Theodore Judah caught pneumonia in Panama and died.
How convenient for the Associates.
You know those Hollywood stories about the scriptwriter
who comes up with the idea, fashions the script,
does about a dozen rewrites, then shows up at the studio
only to find out he's been locked out by the producers?
That all began with Theodore Judah.
On January 8th 1863,
construction began on the Central Pacific Railroad,
and with Judah gone, the Associates could exploit the situation
like nobody's business.
Oh, they bamboozled everybody they came in contact with.
They built companies within companies within companies,
like little Russian dolls of corruption.
For instance, they would mine their own coal for $2 a tonne
and then sell it back to themselves for $6 a tonne.
They chopped down all the trees along the way to build sleepers.
They tore up the land, they relocated the Indians.
Charles Crocker would arrive at a small settlement or town
and shake down the local politicians.
"Fork over, or the train doesn't come through here.
"You will dry up and die in a year."
You might ask yourself, how did these guys get away with it?
Well, first of all, America was involved in a Civil War
so the President was a little distracted.
Also, this was California, so far away from the rest
of the country that they weren't being scrutinised.
The building of the transcontinental railroad
is the greatest entwining of technical achievement
and outright financial plunder ever.
When the Central Pacific reached the Sierra Nevada mountains,
the new chief engineer, James Strobridge, was faced with his most daunting task yet -
getting iron rail up a 12,000-foot summit
and drilling a tunnel into granite.
He didn't have nearly enough people.
Charles Crocker's idea was to hire Chinese labourers from San Francisco.
Foreman Strobridge thought that was stupid.
"They built the Great Wall of China," said Crocker.
So reluctantly, Strobridge agreed.
Crocker hired 50 Chinese workers, at the rate of a dollar a day.
Put them on a flat car, brought them up into these mountains
and dumped them off.
Pretty safe to say the Chinese were fatalistic about the whole thing.
They didn't even look around at their surroundings.
They just pitched their tents, cooked up some cuttlefish and rice
and went to bed. Next morning, got up, picked up an axe and shovel
and started busting rock.
Strobridge waited for them to pass out from exhaustion
but 12 hours later, they were still going at it.
Damnedest thing he'd ever seen.
So Crocker sent for more Chinese.
Then more Chinese.
By the end of 1865, almost every able-bodied
Chinese man in California was working on this railroad.
Meanwhile, as the Union Pacific was pushing westward across the plains,
covering 10 miles a day,
the Central Pacific of California was bogged down at the Donner Summit,
averaging ten inches a day.
The granite was impossible.
Fortunately, good old nitroglycerine saved the day.
It dramatically sped up the construction,
at the expense of a few Chinese labourers.
OK, not a few. A lot.
The two companies become so subsumed with laying track
and snaffling up land, that they actually bypassed each other.
For a while, they were building tracks in opposite directions,
side by side.
Finally, Congress has enough of the absurdity and decrees
that on May 10th 1869,
the tracks will meet at Promontory Summit, Utah.
A golden spike is hammered into the ground,
everyone celebrates, and then the spike is put away for safekeeping.
Obviously, who's going to leave a golden spike
laying in the ground in Utah. They're not stupid.
Nine years after that seminal meeting of shopkeepers
in that hardware store, the greatest engineering feat
of the 19th century was complete.
Oh, brass bands played and newspapers rejoiced
and people crowed and beat their chests,
and then they all went back to shipping stuff by boat.
That's right. No-one used the fucking railroad.
No-one knew how to use the railroad.
There was no commercial interest in the railroad,
no-one knew how to transport goods, no-one knew how to regulate tariffs.
It was still much cheaper to ship stuff by boat around South America.
Quite simply, the railroad had been built before its time.
Within five years, a good portion of it was ripped up and relocated.
Collis Huntington eventually bribed the shipping companies
to raise their rates so the railroads could compete.
For the next 25 years, these four men, the Associates,
would become astoundingly wealthy.
They controlled almost all of the track in the American West.
They built communities or destroyed communities,
and they literally defined the space and the shape of California.
They were an octopus - four fat guys in one corpus,
spreading their slimy tentacles of influence throughout the West.
So do you see these guys ultimately as heroes or as conmen?
I see them as Californians, which means they're both those things.
That's what California always is. It's the dream of
there it is, take it, exploit it,
and buy yourself a Ferrari and swagger about.
The true legacy of the Associates isn't a 1,000-mile stretch
of iron and steel. Their true legacy is the economic concept
of creative destruction.
Overbuild it, overhype it, manage it wretchedly
and leave a wake of environmental and human destruction behind you.
Most importantly, make your profit not from selling any real product,
like transportation, but from financial finagling and insider contracts.
Empty technology.
These guys wrote the blueprint for economic disaster
still embraced by California today.
California is currently suffering a horrendous drought.
It diverts its water from the Owens Valley 400 miles south
to feed the lawns of people in Hollywood.
It built a nuclear reactor on a fault line.
It's got a $60 billion high-speed rail line in Los Angeles
that people just stare at.
Right?
But of all the boneheaded civil engineering projects
ever perpetrated on the people of California,
nothing matches the corruption and ineptitude of the Associates.
MUSIC: "California" by Joni Mitchell
Despite this greed and corruption,
Californians are always looking forward.
This positive attitude has created an eternal optimism.
Are you cynical about California or, as a native, are you hopeful?
Very hopeful.
California is wonderfully entrepreneurial,
it's endlessly expansive in its ideas.
That's the whole point, right? People come here,
it's the repository of the nation's dreams.
They run out of space, of the land, and then they look to...
cyberspace, space. That next thing to conquer.
Nowhere in California are people more optimistic
than in San Francisco. When your city is constantly at risk
from an earthquake, you have to be optimistic.
San Francisco grew so fast it was called the Instant City.
In fact it was called the Instant City six times,
because that's how many times it burnt down.
And every time, it came back quicker and more spectacularly,
built on equal parts radicalism and guilt-driven philanthropy.
In its earliest incarnation, it was known as Yerba Buena
and it was controlled entirely by Australian ex-convicts
who called themselves the Sydney Ducks.
The Ducks were so ruthless that even the police
didn't want anything to do with them.
They basically terrorised the town
and worst of all, they set fire to it,
because the town was largely made out of wood,
so one of the ways you could loot what wealth there was
was by setting fire to it. In the resulting panic,
they would basically loot the place.
In 1851, a vigilante society was formed which, through
a self-appointed process of kangaroo trials, lynchings and deportations,
managed to restore some semblance of control to the place.
San Francisco prospered.
It was being called "the Paris of the West".
So Huntington, Crocker, Stanford and Hopkins had parlayed
their fortunes into mansions sitting side by side overlooking the town.
The area was called Nob Hill, because that's what these men were.
Seriously, though, where do you think the term "hobnob" comes from?
And because occasionally, rarely, this is a perfect world,
all four of the mansions were destroyed by the earthquake of 1906.
Unfortunately, so was most of the rest of San Francisco.
The resultant fires that followed the earthquake
did tonnes more damage than the quake itself.
It's the only place I know of in which you had terraced houses
built cheek by jowl made out of wood, and so it was
a very dangerous situation.
It took six days for the bankers' and insurance companies' safes to cool down.
But once they did, San Francisco sprang up even more fervently,
so quickly that, within nine years, it reintroduced itself
to the world at the 1915 Pan-American Exhibit.
In 1937, it unveiled one of the most remarkable
engineering feats in the world.
The Golden Gate Bridge is the orangest structure ever built.
In fact, if you took all the women of Newcastle and put them
side by side, the Golden Gate Bridge would be the second-orangest
thing on the planet. Critics said it couldn't be built,
that its orange-to-weight ratio would cause it to collapse,
but those critics were wrong.
OK, it's not really orange at all. It's kind of reddish-brown, ochre.
San Francisco's geography, its workers' rights' history,
its achievements, have fostered a romanticism
that it's always fought hard to protect.
Its open, tolerant attitude has roots in the longshoreman's
labour movements of the 1800s.
San Franciscans are proud of their spaces.
The writer Jerry Kamstra... probably said it best,
"San Francisco is what's left of America."
That works on a lot of levels.
In fact, old Karl Marx himself visited the place in 1880,
and he remarked, "Rising out of the feverish swirl of the gold rush,
"nowhere has the upheaval of shameless capitalism arrived with greater speed."
Well, Karl Marx should have stuck around
because this town has embraced his radical polemics like no other.
It's always attracted weirdos, non-conformists,
people with a nothing-to-lose attitude, hippies,
freaks and a guy named Jerry Kamstra.
San Francisco has always accommodated the so-called alternative lifestyle.
In 1950, while the rest of the country basked in conformity,
the gay rights movement was founded by Harry Hay,
a communist workers' rights advocate.
Hay founded the Mattachine Society, the first LGBT society in America.
Actually, that was in Los Angeles,
but as soon as they heard the clang, clang, clang of the trolley,
they headed for San Francisco.
Why today, it's estimated that upwards of three dozen gays
either reside in or are visiting San Francisco.
Oscar Wilde once said that, "Whenever anybody disappears in any part of the world,
"they're almost certain to show up in San Francisco." And he did too.
And, of course, he was quite a sensation when he did.
Something else remarkable happened in San Francisco in 1955.
Something that will never happen again.
People got worked up over a poem.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
Starving hysterical naked
Dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn
Looking for an angry fix.
Only in San Francisco could a poem start a cultural revolution.
Allen Ginsberg's Howl was first performed at the Six Gallery,
and then subsequently broadcast on radio station KPFA.
The poem was a glorious mess.
It championed sexual liberation,
it savaged the very norms of society and good taste and even poetry.
It kicked off an obscenity trial. The one thing San Franciscans
won't tolerate is being told they can't say what they want to say.
Who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists
And screamed with joy.
San Francisco had always been noted for being rather lively
and unconventional.
We didn't know anything but that.
It was just... It was natural.
It was like a fireplace, you know?
I was there in the midst of it. One didn't think of themselves...
But not seeing yourself within that?
All we saw was a group of like-minded strugglers.
The free speech movement essentially just explodes at Berkeley,
at the University of California.
They were like-minded strugglers with strong leadership
who got themselves organised.
People like Mario Savio, and he knew what he was fighting for.
..that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part
and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears, upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus
and you've got to make it stop.
Unlike those students in 1964,
today's activists, like the Occupy Sacramento group,
seem to have no idea why they're occupying.
..is why are they here? So, why are you here?
I'm here...
Right now it's kind of vague. Anthony Bondi says Occupy Sacramento
has what he calls a message team, working on the answer
to why they're here. As it stands right now, that message team
will reveal that tomorrow morning.
So you guys are in the process of forming the reasons why you're here?
That is correct.
And you've got to indicate to the people who run it,
to the people who own it, that unless you're free,
the machine will be prevented from working at all!
I'm here to support...
People! People, of course.
Here's something to try and remember when you're starting a revolution.
Try to occupy a space that actually means something to you.
The Occupy movements of St Paul's Cathedral and Zuccotti Park in New York
fizzled out because those spaces had no incipient meaning
to the people gathered there.
So it turned into a big Facebook party and everyone got
a souvenir glow-in-the-dark key-chain and went back
to occupying the one thing that does mean something to them - cyberspace.
There's not going to be a revolution
until Twitter starts charging 25p a pop to tweet.
That's when the shit will hit the fan.
The free speech movement that began here on Telegraph Avenue
in Berkeley in 1964 did start a cultural revolution.
The University of California was the largest
institute of learning in the world.
It also ran the government's nuclear weapons lab.
It's safe to say the administration was at increasing odds
with its students.
Students would gather in places like People's Park to set out tables,
hand out literature, or organise support for their causes.
People's Park was the equivalent of Speakers' Corner, times a thousand.
These young people believe they are working on behalf
of a nationwide crusade for social justice.
It's linked with the civil rights movement in the South,
many people were getting involved with that,
and then it really grows with the opposition to the Vietnam War.
The adult world might also be thankful that these young people
are here and that they care.
In 1964, The Berkeley administration came down heavy on the students.
They told them they could no longer organise
outside-campus activities.
They thought the students would acquiesce,
but they didn't count on Joan Baez showing up.
We're going to march in, singing We Shall Overcome.
♪ We shall overcome... ♪
In reaction to the pressure put on them by
the university administration, the students increased their activity.
These were college students, and they wanted not to be clamped down
in terms of the kinds of events they did, and what kind
of speakers they had on campus.
The following years saw tensions between the university
and the students, the government, the police and the army escalate.
By '68, clashes between students and police were a common sight on American TV.
It came to a head in early 1969.
The university president banned speeches, rallies
and any disruptive events on the central campus.
He threatened to have any student arrested who participated in protests.
California Governor Ronald Reagan declared a state
of extreme emergency at UC, Berkeley.
I was at Berkeley in 1969 when Governor Reagan
sent military helicopters over the university
to dispense tear gas onto the students.
The National Guard came in with drawn bayonets.
We got to see the real, vicious face of state power.
The movement wasn't suppressed. It mushroomed.
And within five years, it exerted a gravitational pull
over dozens of disparate movements and organisations.
The Yippies, the hippies, the SDS, the Chicago 7,
the Weathermen, Angela Davis, the Black Panthers,
and Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine.
Not sure about that last one.
At no other time in history has America's fashion, music
and lifestyles and culture changed more dramatically
than in those five years between 1964 and 1969.
A worldwide confluence of people trying to change things
was eventually rolled into one unifying word - hippies.
The one tiny thing hippies didn't manage to change was basic,
shitty, evil, human behaviour.
Let it rain, baby.
On February 4th 1974,
Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley campus apartment
by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a militant group that claimed
it wanted to feed the poor and free the planet from suppression.
The SLA fed Patty a lot of LSD, brainwashed her
and forced her to rob banks.
On April 28 1975, Patty Hearst, the granddaughter
of William Randolph Hearst, drove the getaway car when the SLA
robbed the Crocker Bank of California,
owned by the grandson of Charles Crocker.
So, in some weird kind of way, the greed and corruption of California
had come around full circle.
Nowadays, the people of People's Park probably aren't
sitting around discussing Herbert Marcuse or thinking of starting up
an underground newspaper or a revolution.
But no-one says they're not allowed to.
♪ Which side are you on, boys?
♪ Which side are you on?
♪ Which side are you on, boys?
♪ Which side are you on? ♪
They call me Mayor Of The Streets for the whole town,
because I stand up for the people on the streets.
But I'm definitely associated with People's Park.
This is still a radical People's Park?
There is still... Not to the degree it was,
and for me it's really important to bring in the young radicals.
That's the history.
It seems like, astrologically, the '60s is kicking in
on a bigger level right now. That's the whole prophecy
the native people talk about.
They're the second generation. There's a lot of despair here,
but I'm like, "No, we can turn this around."
I know they're bringing everything down, ecological destruction...
Like they took down the oak trees there,
but for me, this was about people and this was what needs to happen.
You know, don't wait for some leader in Washington that's going to bring you hope!
That's not the way it works.
♪ ..Which side are you on?
♪ Which side are you on? ♪
Do you still maintain hope for California? Everything.
Just to commit a creative gesture,
no matter how gloomy dark it is,
is hope. Dissidence is based on hope, for transformation,
and the belief that something that you can do can effect
some kind of change for the better.
♪ I'm so much cooler online
♪ Yeah, I'm cooler online... ♪
The next generation of Californians trying to change the world
are only 40 miles south, in Palo Alto.
The gateway to Silicon Valley,
nexus of nerd-ulence,
the great basin of propeller-headed Poindexters and start-up pioneers.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Intel,
eBay, AOL, Yahoo, they're all here.
This is the Google campus - "campus" implying that they're all
happy little academics, when in fact they're just worker bees
and drones, forced to demean themselves by driving around
on multicoloured bikes.
Why don't you put them in little clown cars?
Silicon Valley is an area of non-descript buildings.
Inside is a workforce taught to believe that work
should be play, not duty,
so they just keep tap dancing on their keyboards all day long.
Looks like they're having a normal conversation
but they're talking in binary code, actually.
Everybody here having a conversation is just going...
"0-0-11-00-11,"
and the other guy's going, "I know what you mean, yeah.
"0-1-011." "No, 01-11-0-0."
There are more millionaires per capita here than anywhere else on Earth.
If you've got an idea for the next search engine, social media site
or an app for finding your nearest drug-dealer,
you can become rich overnight.
And if you're looking to do the next big deal,
you come down to Buck's in Woodside
and over a nine-pound omelette,
sign a contract that'll make you millions.
Back in the '90s, we saw Hotmail, we saw Netscape, PayPal.
You saw those fulminate right here at these tables? Yeah.
They come here and get a cup of coffee and form a multi-million-dollar...
There was the pitch, and you never know what's big, just a couple of guys talking.
It was here that venture capitalists Steve Jurvetson and Sabeer Bhatir
joined forces to create Hotmail,
a company they would eventually sell for $400 million.
Who's in here right now?
Well, Tim Kugel's over there, he was the first president of Yahoo.
He took them to greatness. All these firms, they were here.
Steve Jobs. I used to work for Steve Jobs. I was his home remodelling contractor in '79.
Is he a slave-driver? He was tough.
He was mean but he wasn't the cruel Steve he became later.
When he grew into himself and got confidence, then you had to
really stay out of his way. I knew him when he was still not sure
if he was right about what he was telling me to do.
Maybe you've asked yourself, "Hey, how come the Silicon Valley
"is the hi-tech rock star of the universe?"
Why not Boston? Or Singapore, or that decrepit-looking cluster
of buildings by the roundabout at St Agnes Well shopping centre
in London, right where City Road crosses Old Street?
Why isn't that technological ground zero?
Well, the simple answer is... blimps.
Blimps were a key World War II defence component
against the Japanese invasion of California that never happened.
They were stored in hangars like these,
here at Moffett Airfield in Sunnyvale.
The idea was, supposing you had an airborne aircraft carrier,
something that could carry a bunch of fighter planes,
that could go fairly quickly
and patrol up and down the coast.
Then they built two operational airships.
The trouble was, at the time we didn't really understand wind shear
and other weather problems, and within a couple of months,
both airships went down. At that time, it was decided
this isn't the way to patrol up and down the coast.
A number of technology firms, mostly involved in radio technology,
soon located nearby.
After the war, the blimps left, those companies stayed.
In the ensuing years, Sunnyvale has given rise to new blimps.
Atari comes to mind. Remember Atari? Right.
But after World War II, a lot of these companies
turned their attention to aerospace and technological research.
Amongst the residents was a man named William Shockley,
often called the father of Silicon Valley.
Shockley went to work for Bell Laboratories in New York,
and with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented the transistor.
He relocated to California
and set up an R&D lab. He came up with the idea of using
silicon instead of germanium for conduction in electrical switches.
He was awarded a Nobel prize.
He hired eight highly trained, incredibly skilful assistants
to help him develop and market semiconductors.
Not a single one of them could stand working for Shockley.
He had an irritating habit of berating them in public
and occasionally hooking them up to lie-detectors to make sure
they weren't withholding technical secrets. They all quit.
These eight men would go on to found 65 different hi-tech companies,
amongst them Intel, which invented the microprocessor.
And that begat Hewlett-Packard which begat Dell,
blah-blah-blah, until it all falls into place.
Silicon Valley would not be what it is today
if William Shockley had not been such an obstreperous douche bag.
Shockley went on to become a professor at Stanford
and managed to make himself one of the most despised men in America
by going on TV and pointing out the difference in average IQ
between whites and blacks, waxing at large on eugenics,
and advocating that the government forbid less intelligent people to reproduce.
My research leads me inescapably to the opinion
that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual
and social deficits is hereditary
and racially genetic in origin, and thus not remediable
to a major degree by practical improvements in environment.
Something tells me Old Man Shockley
would have choked on one of his transistors when he realised one day
Dr Dre would sell his Beats brand to Apple computers
for $3 billion.
Yep.
That is the father of Silicon Valley,
the place that's generally considered to be the home
of the technological revolution that changed the world
and catapulted California into the eighth-largest economy in the world.
But let's get one thing straight.
Silicon Valley did not invent the computer. Or the internet.
Or the PC. Or Facebook.
What Silicon Valley does is to exploit all those things
invented in Singapore or China,
or even that squirrely little roundabout in London,
and then they make it more aerodynamic
and sleek and user friendly and eye catching,
and then they stuff it into the feedback loop
of web-fingered, guppy-mouthed youths
sitting around pining for the next new gadget or social media concept.
"I'm going to invent a search engine for people
"who are fans of Belinda Carlisle called Go Go Google."
The people of Silicon Valley,
whether they want to acknowledge it or not,
are the children of the generation that wanted to change the world.
You know, hippies.
In the '60s, they thought they could do that through free love.
Now it's through Match.com.
But in both movements, the protagonists created
their best ideas while they were young and reckless.
If you're over 35 in Silicon Valley, you're done.
Collect your Tesla and hit the road, Jack.
Silicon Valley prides itself on taking chances
and thinking outside the box and not being afraid to make mistakes,
which happens to be true if you're a male, white 20-something.
82% of the hi-tech companies in Silicon Valley
are owned by white males,
18% by Asians or Pacific Islanders.
Of that number, 8% are women.
Blacks, 0%. Yep, the great dream of eugenics is coming true
here in Techville.
Sometime this year, YouTube will register
its one-billionth racist comment.
It's quite possible, within our lifetime, that systematic
Facebook bullying will prompt the inferior people on the planet
to top themselves and do us all a favour,
thus leaving a world of superior mental beings -
just the way Shockley would have wanted it.
MUSIC: "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys
It seems, here in California, the only way to run a business
is to be an unflinching jerk. By dividing and conquering,
poisoning the workplace, focusing your hostility on the less powerful,
you will ultimately enrich the lives of Americans everywhere.
So thank you, Collis P Huntington,
even though you once ran over a woman with your own train
travelling on your own railroad
and then refused to pay her medical bill and subsequent funeral charges,
because you didn't want to be perceived as a softie.
And thank you, Steve Jobs.
Even though you refused to acknowledge the paternity
of your own daughter and forced her mom to live on welfare,
you gave us the iPod.
So thanks a million, dead guy!
California is one continuous diaspora.
Every day, people come here from Chicago, from Dayton, from Mexico.
They move to Los Angeles to be actors, rappers, stand-up comedians.
They move to the Silicon Valley to be techno-whizzes,
but the people who arrived in California to escape the Dust Bowl
weren't looking for hipster kudos.
They were just looking for survival.
The Dust Bowl was a tragedy in the most privileged,
white American sense of the word.
Already reeling from the financial crash of 1929,
the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas
underwent a series of crippling economic and environmental disasters.
In 1932, the Midwest suffered its worst drought in recorded history.
That didn't look too staged, did it?
It scorched the land from Texas to South Dakota.
Farmers could do nothing but watch their crops die.
And then, in the summer of 1935, the most devastating punch arrived
in the form of dust storms that blackened the sky and roiled
through farms, towns and houses, choking everything in their wake.
I'll tell you, that looked like the worst storm you ever saw.
The whole sky was just a black cloud,
but it was all dirt.
60 years later, geologists would discover that had any of these
farmers sunk their wells deep enough, they would have found
the Ogalalla Aquifer,
the largest deposit of freshwater in the Northern Hemisphere.
The collapse of the agricultural economy had seeped
into everyone's life, so they grabbed their families
and they came west - pushed, not pulled.
There was never any question where they were heading,
California. The question is, why?
♪ Lots of folks back east they say
♪ Is leaving home every day
♪ Beating the hot, old dusty way
♪ To the California line
♪ Across the desert sands they roll
♪ Getting out of that old Dust Bowl
♪ They think they're going to a sugar bowl but here's what they find. ♪
California has always pretty much sent out mixed signals
to the rest of the country.
The state government's bottom line was always one of migration control,
but the tourist industry and the media have always tried to sell
California as the land of opportunity
or, more succinctly, luck.
Those vacation ads in the '30s always came with fine-print warning.
"Advise anyone coming to California to seek employment
"to look elsewhere, lest they be disappointed."
But those government pamphlets were never going to compete with Hollywood.
You see, during the Depression, the one thing Americans never
stopped doing was going to the movies,
and all those feel-good comedies and horse operas
and romantic musicals were always set in California.
Midwesterners didn't read the fine print at the bottom
of government pamphlets.
They watched WC Fields inherit an orange grove
and move his entire family to California
and in the space of one reel,
go from devastation to pure good fortune.
That orange ranch, and 40...
$44,000. Mr Abernathy here's got to get his commission.
That's a hold-up!
But it's a deal. OK. Excuse me.
It was stories like this that reaffirmed California's promise
of dream fulfilment.
You know, if you'd asked any of those Okies
why they came to California, they'd probably have been
as tight-lipped and stoic as possible.
"Well, mister, I was just farming there in Oklahoma
"and it's just getting droughtier and droughtier."
But underneath this understatement was this vague notion,
something they possibly couldn't even verbalise,
but that they'd heard in a hundred songs.
♪ They say, come on, you Okies
♪ Work is easy found
♪ Bring along your cotton pack
♪ You can pick the whole year round
♪ Get your money every night
♪ And spread your blanket down
♪ It's always bright and warm
♪ You can sleep out on the ground. ♪
Between 1935 and 1940, 250,000 Okies, Arkies and hillbillies
had moved to California.
They had no schools, no insurance, no health care,
no union. Those who didn't find work were settled
into farm security administration camps
set up by the US government.
How are you doing? Hello there, Cowboy.
How are you, Cowboy? Good to meet you.
I'm doing pretty good for an old man. Are you Earl? I'm Earl.
Have to look down every now and then.
How are you doing? Rich.
WC Stamps. WC, nice to meet you.
Earl and WC are Okies. They were brought here
by their parents to the Sunset labour camp in the 1930s.
This picture here is an aerial view and it shows the camp.
So how many buildings were there? This is huge.
There were probably a good 100 or more families.
WC and his family came to California from Oklahoma.
This is a house that we lived in on a ranch.
Where's you? Right there.
About a year-and-a-half old, but you can see
the sun coming through the roof. Yeah.
So it was not too well put together.
What did you imagine California was going to be like?
I was just hoping things were going to be better.
It was destitute where we were.
But things didn't get better for everyone.
Some of the migrants found work on the massive corporate-owned farms
where they became a source of cheap labour.
I started picking cotton when I was seven years old.
I could pick 50lb a day.
There were so many migrants available for work
that they drove down wages and became a target for resentment.
The great welcoming arms of California turned a white
American subculture into a scapegoat for the state's problems.
This was seen as an invasion by a lot of people in California.
Police forces were organised to stop them at the border.
Editorials ran, claiming that they were degenerates,
just out for a free hand-out.
People from Oklahoma didn't think anything of being called "Okies",
but it was becoming a dirty word.
Much like we were looked down on
but people just didn't want to associate with us.
Why? We were Okies.
We were American citizens,
born and raised in the United States of America,
and we're like refugees. We're coming, trying to survive.
And they were turning them around at the state border.
If you didn't have so much money, or if there'd been supposedly so many
come through this day, then no more.
"You've got to go back to where you come from."
What we lived through, you can't believe what it was.
But I cherish my memories, that I'll grant you.
Photographers and folklorists have made a field day
of imprinting on us the harshness of the Okie migration.
In 1935, the farm security administration hired
photographer Dorothea Lange to document the growing number
of homeless Dust Bowl refugees.
She really strove to give a sense of dignity and power,
self-reliance. You'll notice she often shoots from below.
The person fills the frame and feels much more prominent
instead of looking downward and making them appear pitiable and so forth.
I think that's one of her strongest traits.
They were trying to appeal to people's hearts
and make a case for immediate action,
and if photographs could be used to humanise these people,
and make people aware that they were suffering unnecessarily,
then that was a very good step.
The writers and the photographers had a field day capturing
this exodus in pitiable black and white,
high definition, close up.
You know, the gunnysack kids, and the hard-lived faces.
But it wasn't a 1,200-mile road trip across Route 66
that made people look like this.
They looked like this before they left.
I would venture to say the kids had a great time.
They were on a road trip, for crying out loud.
The Grapes Of Wrath has forever overwrought this tableau on our psyches.
Steinbeck, himself a Californian, highlighted the mistreatment
and the exploitation of the Dust Bowl workers by the farm owners.
These farm owners dismissed the novel as a pack of lies.
The truth of the matter is, for the majority of these people,
old man Joad didn't cop it along the way.
They didn't get chased and beaten up by vigilantes with sticks
or succumb to consumption.
The Dust Bowl migrants, for the most part, didn't really care
for The Grapes Of Wrath, because it demeaned them, it humiliated them.
And Steinbeck, for all his intentions,
ended up debasing the very people that he meant to champion.
The book, The Grapes Of Wrath, do you think that
did you a favour...?
No, no. I don't think so.
I don't either. The thing is, it's a novel
and it's fiction, and he made a tonne of money on that.
I always felt that Steinbeck's characters
were kind of ruthlessly honest. I found him very unsentimental.
They didn't like him at all in his home town because of it.
They celebrate him now but he got the cold shoulder from a lot of people,
because he was showing a side of California nobody wanted to acknowledge.
The whole time that people were looking at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
and that manufactured world, he was also saying,
"Hey, let's do something about not killing these people."
The California government didn't really like the FSA camps
because they thought they would foment union activity.
And they did. Steinbeck published The Grapes Of Wrath in 1939
and he quickly fell into the same trap as the sympathists before him.
He politicised the problem, and suddenly this group
of hard-working Protestant stock, rural people,
were co-opted by a neo-populist left-wing movement.
♪ I'm a-looking for a job at honest pay
♪ I'm a-looking for a job at honest pay... ♪
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie is defined by the music
he produced at the time of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
His songs earned him the nickname the Dust Bowl Troubadour.
He wrote songs about the working man and hosted a radio show
that allowed him to perform these protest songs.
They would highlight the plight of the blue-collar worker.
The listeners found in Woody something they could relate to -
an imagined sense of community.
Woody, of course, has inspired reams of musical scholarship.
He's the god. The god of folk music,
the guy with the guitar that killed fascists.
But in 1937, he was just a hillbilly LA DJ
playing train and minstrel songs
and advertising his own headache pills over the air.
But he understood the alienation of the blue-collar worker,
the low-income guy, in a way that appealed to them emotionally.
Woody's description of the kind of songs he despised
could easily be ascribed to Steinbeck's novel.
Woody is a populist hero. He would go on to invent Bob Dylan.
And that, of course, would run its ugly course
and eventually regurgitate something as synthetic and void of humanity
as Mumford & Sons.
Woody's greatest contribution to music was his DIY ethic.
An untrained, unorthodox, personal perspective
that was central to his work.
And that ethic has carried over from Dylan to the Clash
to Springsteen to God knows where next,
but the people he was singing about probably never even heard
of Woody Guthrie or his songs.
Why? Because they were too goddamn busy picking lettuce
in the San Joaquin Valley to be listening to radio!
I don't know how much effect his songs had, really,
on the Dust Bowl migrants.
They wouldn't have been able to hear it.
They probably wouldn't, but he certainly defined
that era of California.
Woody was what he was. He was an itinerant songwriter.
He certainly didn't have the effect that Lefty Frizzell had,
or Spade Cooley or Bob Wills.
Those guys were the big stars out here.
Now, friends, we're going to play an old breakdown,
the kind that you can just roll up the rug, move back the chairs
and turn on. You know, one of the old deep-in-the-heart-of-Texas tunes,
here it is. Let's go, boys, a breakdown!
On any weekend night in every FSA camp
or on the outskirts of towns like Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto
or Tulare, there was a Pioneer Club, or a Texahoma Club,
full of drinking, dancing, fist-fighting Okies.
There was always a live band.
Turns out, Americans don't turn to politics or religion
to find their working consensus.
Not on Saturday night anyway. They find it in music.
Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.
Bob Wills. He'd go, "Aah-ha!"
He was the first live band that I ever went to
and we went 17 miles in the wagon to see Bob Wills.
It was Western Swing led by Bob Wills that the California migrants
felt belonged to them.
It was made by people like them and it reminded them of home.
And with others like Gene Autry, Rose Maddox,
Spade Cooley and his Orchestra,
the Light Crust Doughboys and Tex Ritter,
Western Swing was having a huge influence on Californian music.
♪ I've been working hard the whole week long
♪ But I'm a-gonna have some wine, women and song
♪ Got to work next week but that's all right
♪ I've got five dollars and it's Saturday night. ♪
Those Okies, 1,000 miles from home,
didn't need to sift through the metaphors.
The rest of California considered them to be pitiable, illiterate hillbillies.
The California public schools instituted a programme
to eradicate the accents of the migrant workers' children.
They were scorned by the so-called sophisticated urban population.
And their response was music. Real music.
♪ Where's that gal with the red dress on?
♪ Some folks call her Dinah
♪ Stole my heart away from me down in Louisiana... ♪
So a guy getting up on stage in a cowboy suit
with an "aw, shucks" attitude and singing about open spaces,
the dignity of hard work, the genuineness of friends and family,
was their single most important source of group integrity.
It was the language of their subculture.
♪ I came here looking for something... ♪
In the years following World War II,
Bakersfield had tonnes of honky-tonks, most notably
the Blackboard Cafe, where Western Swing was being played.
But a new sound was emerging, the Bakersfield sound,
and at the forefront would be Buck Owens and his Buckaroos.
♪ And I've worn blisters on my heels
♪ Trying to find me something better... ♪
Owens' music was a response to Nashville, which was churning out
soppy arrangements with strings and harmony singers.
The Bakersfield sound was stewed in a big vat of roadhouse beer.
Telecaster licks, pedal steel whines and a rockabilly attitude.
When you hear the Beatles sing Act Naturally
or the Stones sing Far Away Eyes,
you're listening to the Bakersfield sound.
Just the sound of those records was influential.
In the summer of 1969, the same year as Woodstock
and the Summer of Love in San Francisco,
the same year that man first walked on the moon,
the same year that the Beatles gave their last live performance
and the Stones played Altamont and hired Hell's Angels as security guards,
and 150,000 people packed the Isle of Wight to see Jimi Hendrix,
a marginally popular country singer walked up onto a tiny stage
in Fort Bragg, North Carolina,
to perform for a handful of non-commissioned officers.
Well, that fella's name was Merle Haggard.
He was born in California to migrant parents.
He'd spent his youth in prison, reformed and become a musician.
The audience gave him a pretty lukewarm reception,
not really buying what he had to say, so he decided to try out
a new song that he'd been working on on the way to the gig.
That song was called Okie From Muskogee.
♪ I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee... ♪
To this day, Okie From Muscogee is one of the most polarising songs ever recorded,
and it catapulted Merle Haggard into the ranks of superstardom
along with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.
♪ The place where even squares can have a ball... ♪
You can view Okie From Muskogee as an ode to simple American living,
or as an anti-protest song
meant to anger the counterculture of its time.
Few songs have ever created such a shit storm of misinterpretation
or misappropriation.
Whatever you think of the song Okie From Muskogee,
what it achieved was to open up a reservoir of group pride
amongst the migrant California culture.
What did you think when you first heard Okie From Muskogee?
I thought it was pretty great, myself!
When we first came in, "Okie" was a dirty word.
They called you an Okie and you just wanted to...
"OK, let's draw a line and we'll just get it on."
Now we look at it, you know, we're proud of it.
♪ I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee... ♪
Haggard tried to point out that he had meant for it to be satirical,
but the right wing cloaked themselves in the song.
George Wallace, the bullet-headed race-baiting Governor of Alabama,
used it as his re-election anthem.
Richard Nixon invited Haggard to come to the White House to sing it.
By 1969, the Okies were absorbed into the California hustle and flow.
Nowadays, the Okie just seems like an invention,
a collective work of shared trauma and real fiction.
But it was country music that bridged that gap.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
The original lyrics to Okie From Muskogee are on display
at the Smithsonian Institute. And there's a copy of the song
buried in a time capsule on the moon.
Not bad for a three-chord ditty from a California ex-con guitarist.
♪ Tonight the bottle let me down... ♪
Merle was born right out of that Dust Bowl refugee period
that Woody Guthrie wrote about, so he's the descendant of that.
And all that stuff gave California a certain kind of musical soul
that maybe it didn't have before.
Once California musicians realised that their music could take on
all kinds of overtly critical manifestations,
they headed in a myriad of directions.
Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers
emulated the Bakersfield sound, but in a way
that both countered the right-wing mentality of those singers,
and paid tribute to them as well.
They were Buck Owens' hippie doppelgangers.
MUSIC: "Christine's Tune" by the Flying Burrito Brothers
Gram Parsons just took the Bakersfield sound
to another direction. Cos it was kind of open for that out here.
He couldn't have done what he did in Nashville.
He could do it out here.
So then you started getting groups that grew up out here,
that had really less concern about being genre-specific.
So you had, you know, groups like the Grateful Dead or Quicksilver,
that could mix all those things together.
Unlike Haggard, Gram Parsons smoked a LOT of marijuana.
Then he took too much heroin and died.
They buried his body in Joshua Tree, California,
then his fans dug it up and hid it somewhere.
Out of the Burrito Brothers came the Byrds,
then Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, and finally the Eagles...
♪ Welcome to the Hotel California... ♪
..who would eventually distil the California Country sound
into the ultimate all-time fuck-you valentine to this state -
Hotel California.
♪ ..Any time of year... ♪
Now, the Eagles, of course,
would become so big that they were basically their own corporation.
The rest of pop music didn't fare so well,
and country music became so homogenised that it began to
resemble those giant farm factories from the '30s.
And out of this faux-hillbilly cesspool crawled
Billy Ray Cyrus singing Achy Breaky Heart,
and HIS loins begat a cloacal combination
of sperm and mucus and synthesised slime that is
Miley Cyrus, Hammer Licker.
It's all gone to shit, people.
But it all began in the San Joaquin Valley.
And the music that came out of those fields
is still the most important source of Okie integrity.
Almost to a person, anyone who moves to California
lets the prevailing culture shape them.
But every once in a while,
someone in California shapes the culture itself.
♪ How many of you that sit and judge me
♪ Ever walked the streets of Bakersfield?
♪ Yeah! ♪
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
♪ I'd like to rest my heavy head tonight
♪ On a bed of California stars... ♪
In the beginning, people came to California in search of gold.
Now it's hammered into Oscar statuettes
and the Golden State welcomes you to come and try your luck in Hollywood.
Hollywood, of course,
is the universal centre of mainstream cinema -
home of the epic and the blockbuster
and the bromance and the romcom and pretty much 99%
of all the cinematic turds foisted upon mankind.
But in the beginning, every film made in Hollywood
was actually an indie film.
That's right - made by renegades and upstarts.
And weirdest of all, the birth of cinema can be traced back
to the same guy who fleeced California
for everything it was worth.
Good ol' Leland Stanford.
♪ ..Crash, bang, wallop What a picture... ♪
To win a bet, Stanford paid the photographer Eadweard Muybridge
to prove that all four hooves of a galloping horse
left the ground at the same time.
They did, and this event led to the first motion picture projector.
But you'll already know that from other BBC Four documentaries.
But what this bet did was give rise to the birth of Hollywood.
Hollywood was built by a couple named Harvey and Daeida Wilcox.
They bought 160 acres in 1887
when there was nothing here but peach and apricot groves.
Harvey tried to farm it, but he failed.
Then he carved it up into little plots
and tried to build a Christian Utopia.
His wife named it Hollywood.
Harvey envisioned a place where teetotallers could worship their god
without outside interference.
Yeah, you can see how that worked out.
The place quickly went to shit, filled up with hookers,
down-and-outers, actors...
pretty much the same group of people who live here now.
The replacement of a real god with a preferred god
is one of the don't-go-theres in the Bible.
But don't tell that to Hollywood,
because the Bible didn't invent the close-up.
Movies did.
And when moviegoers first saw a close-up, some of them passed out.
It's still the greatest special effect ever.
See, God is a very far-off concept.
But this face is right in front of you, just like Theda Bara.
Never mind that she was really Theodosia Goodman,
a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati.
Hollywood transformed Theda Bara
into the love child of a French artist and an Egyptian princess,
conceived on the Nile, born in the shadow of the Sphinx.
The damn girl had barely ever been out of Ohio.
She became the greatest screen vamp of early films.
Hollywood had discovered it could create a goddess
out of nothing but pure hype.
The greatest trick of Hollywood
was to invent a participatory religion.
It's like we have an intimate relationship with these "gods".
We sit at the altar and eat sacramental popcorn,
while worshipping at the foot of Matthew McConaughey.
And we're given plot information that even the gods aren't aware of.
We get to fill in the narrative gaps.
It's like we're controlling the story.
We get to reward or punish these gods with box-office receipts.
We dress them up and put them on the red carpet.
We humiliate them by putting them on the cover of People magazine.
We cry for them when they're in rehab.
We breathlessly await the arrival of the Messiah god child
delivered onto Earth by Brangelina - a child so special
they closed down the borders of an entire African nation
to give birth to it.
The hell is wrong with mankind?!
♪ I feel pretty Oh, so pretty... ♪
It shouldn't surprise you
that the Barbie doll was invented in El Segundo, California.
Cos in California, if you look perfect, you are perfect.
So Southern Cal types slice and dice themselves up, they hit the gym,
they dine at the Ivy, they climb behind the wheel
of a precision German-made chariot
so they can look just like their idols.
In 2004, California passed Proposition 71,
legalising therapeutic cloning.
I think you can replace the word "therapeutic" with "cosmetic".
So there you go - just replace the middleman, the face-lift guy,
and just go right to creating
your own blue-eyed, blonde-haired, perfectly eugenicised Aryan
David Hasselhoff knock-off.
The kind of god child that would make William Shockley himself
want to go out and get a face-lift.
California used to mine gold. Now they mines genes.
Do you see this face, people?
This is the kind of face that has
kept me out of the Hollywood big time for 40 years.
This is a BBC face - a BBC Four face,
the kind of face you can't even see in the daytime, only at night.
♪ They're gonna put me in the movies
♪ They're gonna make a big star out of me
♪ We'll make a film about a man that's sad and lonely
♪ And all I gotta do is act naturally... ♪
California will always be selling itself,
to quote Jed Clampett, as "the place you oughta be".
But Californians aren't drinking that Kool-Aid any more.
The government is currently $35 billion dollars in the hole.
For the first time, California is losing population.
But it will always consume more than it produces,
and mostly what it consumes is history.
The most memorable films about California
have almost always been film-noir -
Chinatown, LA Confidential, Sunset Boulevard.
They use a historical context - the Owens Valley water scandal,
rampant LAPD corruption in the '50s, the faded Hollywood star system -
and then mine them for cynicism and sexual predation.
Why?
Because it's more entertaining than real history.
California has always hated its past.
True reality has never been good enough for Californians,
who are always vaguely dissatisfied with things -
their bodies, their cars, their history, their government.
If you want to watch the definitive film about California,
forget Sunset Boulevard or Chinatown or LA Confidential.
Two epic airheads.
Who was Joan of Arc?
Noah's wife?
We are in danger of flunking most heinously tomorrow, Ted.
Woah!
Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure
states simply that the California attitude trumps everything.
Two high school students are in danger of flunking history.
They find a phone booth that's actually a time machine,
and they transport the world's most notable historical figures
back to San Dimas, California,
to appear in their high school assembly.
It's based on a true story, just like Gravity.
Thus Socrates, Genghis Khan, Billy the Kid,
Beethoven and Abe Lincoln
are snatched out of any historical context,
their philosophies and achievements are manipulated
to serve Bill and Ted's mission - to pass a history course.
In the end, the historical figures, not Bill and Ted,
learn the true meaning of life.
Party on, dude!
MUSIC: "California" by Joni Mitchell
♪ Will you take me as I am
♪ Strung out on another man?
♪ California, I'm comin' home... ♪
Well, that's California, dudes.
The scariest thing is that we're all becoming Californians,
who've always known that the myth is more important than the history,
and that the image is more important than the word.
Some of you watching this thing
will take this as a definitive history of California.
Well, it's not - it's just another
digitally stored piece of television pop culture.
Eventually, you'll forget it was even about California.
You'll just remember this mug. And that's fine.
Let me put it to you another way. Do you know who San Dimas was?
He was the guy beside Jesus on the cross when they got crucified.
But no-one remembers that, because people only remember the headliner.
♪ We came out west together with a common desire
♪ The fever we had might have set the West Coast on fire
♪ Two months later got trouble in mind
♪ Oh, my baby moved out and left me behind
♪ But it's all right cos it's midnight
♪ And I got two more bottles of wine. ♪