It’s Time for California to Conquer a New Frontier

As Los Angeles this weekend contemplates a shrinking economy and waits for a verdict in the new trial of police officers for beating Rodney King, it would be useful for the city and the rest of California to recall the Closing of the Frontier.

That was historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 theory that Americans were naturally more optimistic, mobile, inventive and also careless and wasteful than their old country ancestors because they had “free land to settle.” Expansion came easy as America advanced westward.

But when the frontier closed, Turner warned, Americans would have to adapt to the slower progress of methodical folks in other lands.

That adaptation to slower economic growth is the prospect now facing California and its richest city, Los Angeles. It’s not a bleak prospect--slower growth will be on the larger base that California’s economy has become. Having multiplied tenfold from the 1960s to the late ‘80s, the state ranks seventh among the nations of the world--larger than Canada, smaller than Italy and one-tenth the size of the whole U.S. economy.

Even a low 2% annual rise in California’s economy would create 600,000 jobs and add $12 billion to the state’s output.

But adaptation isn’t easy. In California and Los Angeles it hasn’t even begun, thanks to what business people are calling unconscionable carelessness and sloth among political leaders in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

As a result, the economies of both city and state are atrophying. Los Angeles announced Wednesday that property taxes would be reduced because assessed valuations of county real estate have fallen $14 billion. The tax reduction will bring other problems for county and city budgets already in shortfall.

Also last week, Kemper Securities’ municipal bond analysts called California the economically weakest state in the union. And the business forecasting project at UCLA said California’s recession would continue until the first quarter of 1994, at least.

“I am amazed at the lack of interest and support for business that I see in this state,” says Les McCraw, a South Carolina native who is chairman of Fluor Corp., the Irvine-based engineering and construction firm. McCraw recently organized a rally to support Walt Disney Co.’s proposed $3-billion theme park and hotels complex at the Disneyland site in Anaheim. Disney has requested public investment in infrastructure to accompany its expansion, and local officials are balking.

McCraw’s point was not on the merits of the local argument, but that the state’s politicians should be in there trying to resolve conflicts and get moving on a project that promises to create 28,000 jobs. But Gov. Pete Wilson declined to attend McCraw’s rally.

The state is losing good jobs. Hughes Aircraft has just announced that it will move 2,000 engineering jobs from Canoga Park to Tucson, Ariz. Ominously, Santa Clara-based Intel Corp. decided on New Mexico for production of its latest and most advanced microprocessor, a development that threatens to take scientific work away from California.

What happened to California? Complacency. The state grew so rich so easily in the years after World War II, it was unprepared for really tough times. The current recession is severe because it results partly from California’s weaknesses--high costs, bureaucratic government, over-dependence on defense spending.

Yet even in crisis, the state’s officials act like sleepwalkers when it comes to jobs and business. About the only thing Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley did in the past year is appoint Peter Ueberroth to head Rebuild LA. It has made little progress but takes the criticism that might otherwise aim at Bradley.

Curiously, Gov. Wilson appointed the same Ueberroth to head a state Competitiveness Council. Their lack of imagination and drive recalls the old wisecrack about an actress whose on-screen emotions “ran the gamut from A to B.”

But lack of leadership is no joke. It has allowed California’s economy to erode to a point that taxes must be raised, further undermining the state’s competitiveness. Yes, modern complex states require taxes because they offer amenities--such as higher education systems that help business. But it pays to be clever. Washington is a complex state that taxes gasoline and retail sales but not incomes as California does. And Washington, like all other Western states, is taking business from California.

Significantly, however, the charge of complacency does not apply to Los Angeles’ post-riot action on police and readiness.

Whatever the verdict in the new King trial, violence probably won’t be a problem and there won’t be riots. Police are prepared this time, and throughout Los Angeles County--once described as 88 suburbs in search of a city--there is a greater recognition of mutual dependence.

And that spirit is reflected in other ways. Reform has begun. The state’s voters have approved term limits to break up a corrupt legislature. In Los Angeles, officials from business, education, churches and city politics have come together to devise a strong program of reform for the public schools.

“We’re starting to address the biggest economic and social threat we have: the prospect of a wasted, undertrained underclass,” says Eli Broad, head of SunAmerica Inc. and a prominent Los Angeles businessman. And, he adds, “I think, finally, people in government are getting the message to be more pro-business.”

The state has reformed before. In 1911, California voters threw out a corrupt legislature, elected Hiram Johnson as governor and started a trend in progressive government that became a model for the whole United States.

Nobody says that reform in the present will be easy. But Broad, a native of Detroit, predicts that “between 1995 and 2000, California’s growth will again be faster than the rest of the country.”

If so, it will be because Californians have adapted to a new, more demanding time.

In that respect, we might all remember that historian Turner was only partly right about the Closing of the Frontier. Yes, America changed after the 1890s, but its growth in the 20th Century was often many times greater than during frontier days when “free land” beckoned. And we should also remember that to Los Angeles’ and California’s hundreds of thousands of immigrants, this is still the open frontier.