Palo Alto, Disinterred: An Interview with Malcolm Harris
Malcolm Harris | Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World | Little, Brown | 2023 | 720 Pages
The modern tendrils of technology remind me a bit of the wisteria growing around my home. Planted in the 1890s, near the time of Stanford University’s founding, it began as ornamentation; a pleasant compliment to life. Today, its vines creep along the eaves with impunity, wiggling into shingles and crevices with invasive intent. Twice a year it blooms, curtaining our patio with bursts of periwinkle petals that descend from the vines. A sucker for nature’s superfluities, I find it just beautiful enough to excuse the way it’s dismantling my roof.
The bouquet of Silicon Valley’s harvest—video cameras, the internet, advanced weaponry—has provided some initially intriguing, but increasingly daunting circumstances. Sure, with our devices and applications we’re more efficient, more advanced, more “connected.” At the same time, this bounty is swiftly becoming a burden. Resembling an insatiable ouroboros, it aspires to consume our every waking moment, reducing the myriad expressions of humanity to little more than engagement metrics and k-factors. The technocapitalists have managed to monetize everything, it seems—even boredom.
For the baffled masses wondering how we’ve allowed ourselves to become encumbered by conveniences and complicit in crimes against humanity, that’s the thing, we didn’t. At risk of sounding reductive, our collective reality is simply a concoction of violence and situational happenstance that the privileged few have capitalized upon, as is their wont. The vast majority of us are merely along for the ride. This we know, but still, how did it happen? And who’s been steering this Ship of Fools?
Malcolm Harris’s latest book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World, presents a staggering exploration of the historical forces that shaped the technological mecca of Silicon Valley, while examining both the global and generational repercussions that reverberate from his once-modest hometown. In the text, Harris is approachable, yet unrelenting. His subjects are as inspiring as they are insidious. The depth of his research unveils plentiful connective tissues between capitalism and exploitation, agriculture and organizing, start-ups and psychedelics, as well as the communists and labor leaders that attempted to subvert the malevolence of the ruling class.
Our conversation covers the machinations behind Harris’s massive tome, including the wonders of LSD, Ken Kesey’s myopia, the cut of Herbert Hoover’s jib, Stanford’s affinity for eugenics, and what Harris hopes the future may hold in light of this history.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Ryan Baesemann: In Palo Alto, you refer to California as a "whiteness cartel," Stanford University as a "capitalist eugenics project," and Herbert Hoover's physical appearance as featuring "an abundance of right angles." Your perspective is refreshingly decisive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if conservatives called for the book to be burned. Who would you say this latest book is for?
Malcolm Harris: I don't know if conservatives are going to take it so badly. At least with my first book, which was just as political as this one, I got a pretty fair hearing across the ideological board. I had one critical line about the Obama administration and student loan funding, and everyone was like, "now here's a fair writer!" That was all it took to get 'em. It got good reviews in Reason and American Affairs, and, you know, I'm not a liberal. If they're looking for a liberal to object to, they're not going to find it in me.
So hopefully it plays across the ideological spectrum. A lot of people are interested in the history of Silicon Valley politically, and what the politics of Silicon Valley are historically. And I think they have been misled regarding that question. I want everyone to read the book. Certainly Americans. Certainly Californians. Certainly anyone who is in Silicon Valley, who works in Silicon Valley-related industries, which is more and more of us every day. I aspire to a broad and general readership.
RB: Yeah, the reader definitely gets that you’re not a liberal.
MH: I mean, I also hope the history dads buy it and learn a lot of history. I think there are a bunch of ways you can approach it and still come away with something. And I hope that my language doesn't just come across as politically strident or whatever, but that it's fun and makes the book enjoyable to read.
RB: One of my more explosive history dad-gasms was learning the unique extent Herbert Hoover is responsible for the world as we know it today. Everyone puts Reagan on this pedestal as the neocon poster boy, but it seems Hoover is, in fact, the one who pioneered the public sector's foisting of social responsibility onto the private sector (while making sure all his buddies worked in those industries).
As you explain, Hoover held early anti-communist sentiments that set the stage for McCarthyism, he shaped the first municipal zoning and redlining legislations to enforce segregation, he designed America's dependency on canned and processed food, he redirected the water supply that made Southern California possible, and much more.
I knew a few of these examples before reading Palo Alto, but seeing the whole picture together and with such detail is baffling. At the outset of your research, did you know Hoover played such a significant role in not only the shaping of Palo Alto, but also of American and global realities that still persevere today?
MH: No. I mean, I knew Hoover was an important figure in Palo Alto history. But you're right: he gets short shrift in our histories of the 20th century.
We blame Hoover for the depression, and then he's the guy Roosevelt beat to turn the country into Roosevelt Land. Except now, from a vantage point of the 21st century, we realize that we didn't live in Roosevelt Land very long. He died, and then Hoover outlived him. I was really interested to learn more about this period where Truman assumes the presidency after FDR's death, and turns to Hoover for help in realizing his foreign policy agenda. And we think about Truman and Eisenhower as responsible for American foreign policy post-war, but it was really Hoover and Hoover's deputies who were on the ground running shit where it really ended up mattering.
Our control over post-war Japan ends up being one of the most important things in world history. And that's Hoover's boys doing that, with a whole bunch of other Hooverites that are sourced out of Stanford. They then come back and really do create Silicon Valley. That's where it got really crazy for me, looking at how many of these Hoover guys end up creating the basis for Silicon Valley itself. Did I know that Japanese war gold was probably behind the rise of Ampex, which is this original Silicon Valley firm? No Idea. Crazy shit to learn.
I could have done another 10-20 pages on Hoover, and I hope that the 30-something pages that I do have don't become an obstacle for people who are like, "why am I reading about Herbert Hoover for 30 pages in this book that's supposed to be a critique of the historiography of dead white guys who were president and how important they were?" Because I really do think Hoover represents the culmination of so many social forces, as this sort of historical hinge.
He's a member of the first class at Stanford University, he inherits the clothes of the 19th century, quite literally inherits them. Leland Stanford Jr. dies, but Hoover becomes Leland Stanford Jr. in the era where aristocratic privilege need not be transmitted through bloodlines. So you can find someone like Herbert Hoover to be the heir to someone like Stanford, without having to depend on what might be a sickly child. Then Hoover makes America, in a lot of ways, the America that it still is.
His terms at the Commerce Department were so influential as a politician, far more so than his single term in the White House. He reorganized and rendered the American government into something really commercial facing, taking commerce and reorienting so many government purposes through that department and through that perspective and ideology and practice.
He's sort of Forrest Gump-y too, right? He's at the Boxer Rebellion, he's near the Bolshevik Revolution... going around the world as everything's changing. It blows my mind. What a life that guy lived.
RB: Yeah... with an abundance of right angles.
MH: He was a boxy dude!
RB: Can you describe your fact-checking process around David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University, allegedly murdering the widowed Jane Stanford?
They had ideological differences about the purpose of the university: she wanted it to be a spiritual haven of liberal arts, Jordan was excited about engineering and eugenics. There are instances where you state Jane Standford's murder by Jordan as a fact, and others where it's presented as more than likely the case.
MH: I softened it in the final. So another book came out, a more definitive attempt to investigate Jane Stanford's death. Well, I don't know about definitive, exactly. But Richard White, a retired Stanford scholar I rely on, is like, "alright, now that I'm retired from Stanford I'm gonna get to the bottom of this," and he published Who Killed Jane Stanford? as I was going into first proofs.
Fuck me, right? Now I gotta read this whole thing.
So I read it real quick, and I'm very relieved that his perspective basically doesn't disagree with my conclusions. We have the same general shape around what happened. He's a little bit less blaming of Jordan than I am, and so in deference to his scholarship, I softened it a little bit in the final. But like... Jordan did it. You can't prove it, but there's so much circumstantial evidence. She was clearly about to fire his ass.
RB: And this murder arguably predicated everything that came after. Stanford was no longer destined to become some liberal arts sanctuary in Junior’s memory. Instead, in the hands of Jordan, it became this nuts and bolts engineering metropolis.
MH: Well, that... and eugenics very specifically. And bionomics. We still see that logic, too. If you assume economics applies to biology, it becomes an existential truth. It's still the faith of Palo Alto; it's what they believe in, this bionomics.
RB: The fact that Stanford asked applicants for their height as late as 1980... that's kind of weird.
MH: I was just talking to another reporter who is a current Stanford student, who said if you go there now it’s notable how many extraordinarily tall women there are. It's a weird place. You walk around and it demonstrates a certain form of selection. You can feel it.
RB: In many ways, Palo Alto reads like an effort to depict the anti-elite equally to the capitalists. Throughout the book you give credence to these smaller, lesser known anarchists, labor leaders, communists that played significant roles in California’s history, but maybe wouldn't be acknowledged in mainstream accounts that are generally capital-centric. With a number of these individual subjects, like Shūsui Kōtoku or Ernesto Galarza, I read earnest affection in your sentences. If you were given the opportunity to research and profile any one of these figures in depth, which do you think would be the most interesting?
MH: I would love to publish Sam Darcy's memoirs, who was the Communist Party head for the West Coast. Fantastically interesting dude. I got access to sections of his notebooks in the NYU archives, and almost none of them have been published. He's an amazing writer.
The one excerpt that's been published is this great story of how he goes down to the South to start organizing against the Klan as a communist. He hitchhikes a ride with some white farmer, and he's like, "Oh, another farmer! A worker! Let me tell you about what I'm doing!"
Darcy becomes aware, very quickly, that this guy is taking them somewhere he doesn't want to go. He ends up jumping out of the car, and the guy comes around with his shotgun and is chasing him, shouting, "don't talk bad about the Klan!"
That's when he learned about American race relations and how they related to class. I thought that was a pretty amazing story. Darcy’s got all of these amazing stories. And he organized not just in the United States, but also in the Philippines and China. He taught at the Lenin School in Moscow. He was an amazing dude who really stuck to and outlined the principles of California communism that I try to sketch a genealogy of, in part, in Palo Alto.
So yeah, that's definitely one of the strands in the book: trying to illustrate California capitalism, and then the communist pushback in response through this dialectical process. It's a lineage worth understanding, one that's becoming more and more important, and one that's really badly understood. People don't think about it very much. We certainly don't think about it as its own lineage in a way that I think it is one.
With Mike Davis's unfortunate passing, I think that gave people a chance to think about it a little bit more. As he did such an amazing job keeping that torch lit and really illustrating that line in his work. I've been trying to do something similar, I guess, to take up that obligation, because I think there really is one. So I would love to do a Sam Darcy project, as well as maybe a California Communist Reader.
All these weird California communists had brilliant ideas and were really advanced in terms of their understanding of internationalism, in terms of their understanding of race, and the formation of race, and its relation to class. Crucial things that we need to think of more now. There's a reason people are turning to Cedric Robinson, who is an important part of that tradition as well.
Bob Kaufman is another one. If you talk to people who are serious about poetry, they'll talk your ear off about Bob Kaufman. Everyone knows he's the best beat poet. Period. Being able to use him to link this labor history of the old left to the 60s and the beat moment, he stands at such a crucial part of history, and is able to draw and interpret so much out of it. He's another one of those key figures for me, who I think doesn't get enough attention as a labor figure. So maybe people will read this and think of him as part of that lineage. If people find that stuff in here, then pick it up, that would be outstanding.
RB: In creating at least the beginnings of a genealogy and laying out a roadmap for future scholars, it's certainly there.
MH: Doing the research showed me how using peoples' names is such an important way to link histories. It's really important. Even if you don't give someone as much room, putting someone's name in the text, simply writing it down, links it to something else so people can look in the index and see the connections, and they're going to flesh it out.
Because no doubt, there are people that I mention once who have a really interesting story that I wasn't able to flesh out, that maybe the next person down the chain will. And they can find my book as they're doing so. I'm not trained as a historian, right? But as I was doing this research, that stuck out to me as something really important.
RB: There are moments in the tone or structure where it's clear you're trying to get as much as you possibly can onto the page. I gathered that you view these acknowledgments as an imperative more important than cadence.
MH: Yeah, there are a few places where you get seven names of obscure communists in a row. Okay, that doesn't help me, the average reader or whatever. But I'm willing to trade that for the specialist reader, for whom these names might be crucially important. There are books that I've found in that way, where because they listed someone in the index I was able to link their story to what I was doing.
RB: What was your most difficult exclusion? What's the killed-off darling that still haunts you?
MH: I've got a ton of them. A bunch that I normally would get a lot of shit for, too. But really, I maxed out, right? They weren't gonna let me publish any more pages than this. I didn't know Google Docs had a limit until I was trying to combine all my files.
So yeah, there's so much deserving stuff that got cut. If you're a Grateful Dead fan, and you pick up this book, you'll be like, "yea, psychedelic Palo Alto history! I want to know how the Grateful Dead connects to whatever this is." Barely a mention. For people for whom the Grateful Dead is the most important institution in the history of the world, it must be totally galling.
Cesar Chavez isn't in there. I chose to focus on Galarza and his position in history, rather than Cesar Chavez's history, because structurally it relates more to the story that I'm telling. But if you’re a California historian, and you're reading through, you probably expect Cesar Chavez to be there instead, right? You expect the United Farm Workers to be there.
These absences aren’t alarming, I hope; I don’t think they make the book ineffective, but I understand that it is surprising. Stewart Brand isn't in there at all, which again, some people find him to be a really important historical figure. The whole line of the Californian ideology, and its critique, isn't in there except by indication.
When I look at it, it's like, "Yeah, they let you publish 700 fucking pages." I can't complain to anyone about anything, certainly not about that. Still, I have tons of stuff that I can't believe I had to cut. I could have studied for 10 more years and written a multivolume...
RB: It’s clear that you value humor and sarcasm as a tool to lighten the weight of, well, these frequently dreadful accounts. But you also use it as a method to gesture your own perspective in a way that's rather charming. Could you describe your understanding of levity, and perhaps a moment in the text in which it felt like a particularly useful tool?
MH: I can't help it. That's just always the way I write. Strangers ask me if I'm a comedian a lot, and it's not because I'm funny. I think it's because I look like a visual mashup of every Jewish 90s comedian. If you put Seth Green and all those guys in a blender, you get my face.
In terms of writing, I don't really like jokes in theory. I don't think of myself as a funny person. But for whatever reason, as a writing mode, I can't help it. And part of that is being a Marxist, who's soaked in Marx.
I guess there's a certain 19th century writerly, narrative style that I appreciate. But it also could go as far back as watching Rocky and Bullwinkle as a small child. Thinking about the influences on my writing style, I think that's one of the biggest.
I also talk over myself a lot. That's just a thing about me as a person, but also my writing style. I'll be in the middle of a sentence, and then I'll do a footnote, and then an endnote, talking over myself. I think that invites opportunities for humor. I don't use it very consciously, I guess.
But you're perceptive to say that it allows me to get my perspective in there. Levity allows you to bring obvious judgments without being heavy handed.
There were points in the book where a moral judgment is objectively required. Right? I don't think you can talk about the Anglo-American colonization of California without doing so, as it involved some of the most brutal violence of the modern era. Just, straight up. You ask historians who study it, they'll tell you that it doesn't really compare to the colonization of the Midwest, and that it's qualitatively more violent.
RB: Say, for example, 160-acre land grants for a mere two weeks of hunting Native Americans...
MH: Yes. Mechanized violence of the settler state. You can't be objective about that without bringing in some level of moral judgment. But at the same time, I don't think it's very good writing to be like, "...and that was bad," or "that was good.” Humor allows the writer to connect with the reader about shared values, without distracting from the flow of the work. If you don't have shared values, then humor is very hard.
Then again, I do try and keep things objective! Even when I'm being mean, it's pretty objective. Like when I'm talking about Leland Stanford Sr. as like a buffoon, I didn't make that up. That's what everyone said about him. His legacy is the unfolding of much larger historical processes than anyone could possibly hope to control with their will. Anyone who would claim to have control of those processes with their will—even someone like Hoover, who maybe has as good enough a claim as anyone to have actually done it—ends up looking really foolish. They'd end up looking like a clown, at least in a properly rendered history.
RB: Since we're on the topic of humor, when do you anticipate being invited to be a guest lecturer at Stanford?
MH: Don't you need a graduate degree? Hah. I don't think I'm qualified.
Everything's internally conflicted, right? A lot of the scholarship that I'm relying on to do this work comes from people working at Stanford. Gordon Chang works at Stanford. Galarza worked at Stanford. Sylvia Winter worked at Stanford (there's someone who I had to leave out for no good reason). So it's not like there aren't radical people working there.
The academy is a conflicted, divided world that has places for people to contest its dominant values. I don't anticipate this being well received by the administration of Stanford or some parts of Stanford, but I think other parts of Stanford will be very interested. That said, even in its internally conflicted manner, academia has never been somewhere I've felt particularly comfortable or welcome. So I don't think that's future work for me, per se.
RB: Sure, there are leftists, and radicals, and forward-thinking people that have been affiliated with or taught at Stanford, but I don't know if anybody's ever given the whole university such a well-documented and researched fuck you.
MH: Yeah, I mean, the conclusion is like, kill yourself, right?
RB: Hah, we'll get to that.
MH: It's a messed up place. Which is too bad, because it's also so beautiful. There's so much potential in the area, obviously. Pre-colonization, that area provided for such amazing biodiversity. When you read about pre-colonization in Northern California, you can see why people want to live there. It was able to provide pretty amazing ways of life for people who lived there.
RB: Has your background as an activist in both the anti-war and Occupy movements made you a better journalist, writer, historian? How do you classify your work?
MH: I don't really identify as a journalist. I do journalism, sometimes. I differentiate pretty clearly in my mind when I'm doing journalism and when I'm writing in a more general sense. That's what I do most of the time, and what I always have done most of the time, is write.
I studied journalism in high school, I had a really good journalism teacher, I was an Editor-in-Chief of a really good high school paper. So I have respect for American journalism, in that I know its conventions. I even have a healthy respect for the journalist's role in America, but it's not a job I love.
Has it made me a better thinker? Do I understand the world better because I've spent time trying to change it? I think so. That affects how you think about people and how they interact with the world, which starts with yourself. So I'm happy that my role and participation in social struggles, such as they are, inform what I do.
I think I fall pretty clearly into a communist writerly tradition, right? It's a gig. Not as popular a gig these days…
RB: In the text, you give credence to the positive potentials of LSD, stating it's now taken for granted that it offers "a broadening of context, access to the subconscious, and increased empathy." You later add a simple parenthetical, saying, "Acid is fun."
What is your personal perspective on the legacy of psychedelics in Palo Alto? Could it have played a positive role, or rather, is its legacy just a byproduct of a broken system?
MH: Did I include the anecdote about the RAND analyst who takes acid and starts mapping bombing paths over China? I might have had to drop that one, but that was definitely one of the best anecdotes that I found. This guy's like, "Best LSD trip ever! I mapped all these possible bombing routes over Maoist territory!"
So you think about it like... openness for what, right? Connecting synapses for what?
Did I use acid while writing to help me map certain structural coherences over the course of the book and create diagrams on pieces of paper that I can probably dig out of my drawer for you? Yes, I did do that. Psychedelics can be a fun thinking tool. But again, it's always a question of “...for what?” Palo Alto’s history demonstrates that more than anything.
These drugs were part of a program. They were part of an agenda, on both sides. When they're testing them on veterans at the Veterans Hospital, they've got an agenda about developing tools for interrogation. When they're using them on programmers to try and make them program better, they've got an agenda as well.
So the capitalist relation to psychedelics, I think, has become more clear over time. But connecting that into one holistic history, to say this is what they were always about—that microdosing isn't something that they just came up with, that it was at the beginning—I think is important.
Palo Alto may be a critical book in terms of the history of drugs, and that ended up being a bigger part of the book than I initially imagined, particularly the global cocaine and opiate markets. At the same time, I'm not an anti-drug guy. But I think the role of psychedelics on the left in California is generally overstated. And the role of psychedelics on the right is way understated.
That said, acid is still fun.
Photo of a brainstorming session the author conducted while tripping on acid.
RB: I've noticed in the text that you have some animosity towards Ken Kesey?
MH: Yeah. Maybe my beef is more with the historiography than it is with Kesey. It's frustrating that he becomes a representative for a countercultural agenda which then gets conflated with a left-wing agenda. This happened at the time, too. I write about how they asked him to talk of the anti-war protest, and he gets up there and says, "Fuck you."
Well, fuck that guy, first of all. But they should have known to have never invited him up there because they should have been able to understand the reactionary strain in his thinking and writing. Bob Kaufman makes for a really good contrast with him. And the fact that Kesey runs into Kaufman and doesn't recognize that he's a genius.
He doesn't know until other people tell him that this guy's a poet. Meanwhile, Kesey's out there talking for all the freaks and the mental patients...
I didn't come out and say this in the book because I don’t have any concrete evidence for it, so I’m just speculating here, but there's no way he wasn't restraining people, right? He's a champion wrestler working at a psych-ward. You don’t have a holding-people champ work at the holding-people center and never get out from behind the desk. And he writes about that kind of thing at length in Cuckoo’s Nest.
So to have him forever represent the patient perspective, the perspective of the crazy, socially marginalized person as not just the guard, but the scholarly champion. The guy that's the toast of the Stanford MFA program is speaking for the outcast! And then how does he describe the orderlies in his novel?
Meanwhile, that someone like Bob Kaufman, who's been beat up his whole life, who was a labor organizer, who was a communist, who was disabled, who was institutionalized, who was an addict, who did speak for these people, and who wrote much better than Kesey, gets pushed to the side and is seen as an adjunct to these white guys, who were the "real beats," is a problem with the history. I don't think it's too late to rewrite. I don't think it's too late for us to reevaluate that and take figures like Kesey and Stewart Brand, and push them to the side of the story. They've done a really good job putting themselves at the center, but when I went back and tried to reconstitute this story, they weren't anywhere near what was really important.
RB: Let's talk about your last chapter, titled “Resolution.” It seems like the internal plight of today's left is a question of principle versus pragmatism. In this final chapter, you take a fairly principled position, lobbying for reparations to Native Americans via the Land Back Movement. You specifically state that Stanford should return its 8,000+ acres and grant its ~$37 billion endowment to the Muwekma Ohlone. This is a principled position, obviously, but you argue that it's actually pragmatic. Stanford's board doesn't seem terribly interested in forward thinking and morally utilitarian projects when it's their limb on the chopping block. So what kind of leverage could you imagine inspiring such as sea change from the capitalist class, to even entertain something like you've proposed?
MH: You say it's a sea change, but in terms of the scale of what we're talking about, it's tiny. 8,000 acres in the context of North America is nothing, absolutely nothing.
RB: In the context of state or federally owned land, for sure. But for privately owned, coastal California real estate in the Bay Area, that much acreage is...
MH: Sure, that counts for a lot. But again, if you're only going to give away the parks where no one lives and say “you can watch the park for us, but we're not going to let you build houses,” then fuck you.
So on one level, I think it's so small, and it's so easy and pragmatic. You don't even have to convince the government. This is a board of trustees for a university. They make all sorts of crazy lefty decisions all the time, right? That's what we're told. They're not accountable to anyone, except maybe the founders, and they can choose to reject that.
At the same time there are precedents. I outline how [Stanford's Board of Trustees] violated that covenant with the founders [forbidding the sale or parceling of the university's land] once before, for the land that they ceded to the federal government to build the VA. That's a sovereign entity. So they made an exception for a sovereign entity. They recognize the Muwekma Ohlone and repatriated remains. Even though the Federal Government has not recognized—and refuses to recognize—the Muwekma, Stanford has gone ahead and recognized them anyway. They've got a land acknowledgment that acknowledges the Muwekma as the rightful owners of the land, and there's a tribal organization that they can transfer the land to.
So if we're looking at possibilities for the return of land to indigenous groups in the North American continent, this seems like super low-hanging fruit. It wouldn't cost anybody any money. Nobody owns this land, personally, no one settler. It's a nonprofit that can choose to give it away, to give it back.
The first 600 pages of the book, we're talking about world historical scale problems, and then we turn to ten people and say, "alright, here's how we can start solving this. You guys can take this act. You don't have to confiscate anybody's oil wells, you don't have to show up with guns anywhere. You just gotta sign a piece of paper and cede some of this land that you're not even using." Because it's not like Stanford uses all their thousands of fucking acres.
This would be a major historical step forward for this country and the world, going into the next century. Bigger than any climate school they're going to do. Bigger than any school initiative that they're doing with those billions of dollars. They could accomplish what they say their goals are very easily, with very little work.
In terms of an ask, that was a critique I got with my first book: Where's the ask, where's the reform, where are you going to change it? In terms of a reformist ask, you want it to be smaller than that? Really? Smaller than that is nothing. I've gotten varied responses, but mostly people think I'm making a point, that it's not serious, that this is such a ridiculous ask that I must be rejecting the idea that there could be any reform. And if that's what they're drawing from it, then maybe they're right? Maybe there isn't any possibility for reform. If that doesn't look like a reform to people, then maybe there isn't one.
So I leave it open, right? I don't expect it to happen. I don't think they're capable of doing it. I sort of dare them to do it. But if they can't, if it's not a possible reform, then that tells you something definitive about the system itself, which is that it's not personal.
It's not like you're going to convince decision-makers and they're going to make the right decision for you. It really is a question of forces, not men, which is the sort of line I hammer on throughout the whole book. Which means our response to it needs to be about forces, not men.
That's how I feel about the conclusion. I'm serious, and if it doesn't read as pragmatic, then we need to think about what our range for pragmatism really looks like.
RB: For someone attuned to the realities of climate change, and this assumption of infinite capacities for growth being bullshit, it’ll make a whole lot of sense. You’re not saying "pack it up and move" to the entire Stanford campus. You're saying, "you have a tremendous amount of resources at your disposal, do something actually constructive with them." There is already a divestment movement that's happening through these large academic institutions, specifically divesting portions of their endowments that are tied up in oil drilling and exploration, like Harvard, for example. You're suggesting something that can be done in a more deliberate and tangible way?
MH: Yeah, and you have to recognize that Stanford will spend however many millions of dollars building a new climate school, but it has a harder time recognizing that they're not the ones who are going to come up with the right answer.
It's bionomics. If that's Stanford's basis of understanding of the world, then they're not going to realize they need to cede this land. They're too caught up in the systems that have produced this problem. We need other people to lead this phase of solutions. If we're serious about seeing change happen, that means ceding resources.
And that is a real stumbling block, ceding control. Not selling the land or transferring it in a way that's commercially controlled, but ceding it in a non-commercial way opens up all sorts of relations that they're not ready to think about.
So I don't think it's going to happen, and I say so in the book, I don't think they're going to do this. I don't think they can. At the same time, they obviously can.
RB: What is your relationship to the Muwekma Ohlone, and what were your communications like through the process of writing this book?
MH: The book is not a work of journalism, so I wasn't telling the Muwekma version of this story, nor would I presume to. The Ohlone struggles for sovereignty, indigenous struggles for respect in their territories, and labor struggles in Northern California are an important part of the history. And so I used indigenous sources when I was writing this, whether it's Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz or Renya Ramirez or Muwekma Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh or other people who are personally involved, as well as scholars of the experience.
This is my understanding of the history and I treated those sources like I treated other primary and secondary sources in the book. Though I did have a fair bit of skepticism toward some of the twentieth-century white accounts of pre-colonial Ohlone life, that I think mostly get taken for granted.
RB: Such as the ethnologist who determined the Ohlone became extinct in the early 1900s, and that's why they ceased to have federal recognition.
MH: That was Kroeber. Never ask her Ursula K. Le Guin what the "K" in her name stands for. That's her dad.
And he felt bad about [claiming the Ohlone’s extinction], ultimately. He wasn't an awful guy. He's generally accounted as a pro-Indian figure, as was his wife. But no, that was his bad, straight up, Kroeber personally.
RB: Another question I have is around your usage of the term "Indian." You fluctuate between Indian, Native American, and indigenous, but at least in my understanding, we're phasing out the term Indian because it's predicated on a false understanding of geography, many, many centuries ago. What was your logic in using it in the text?
MH: There's a great article by Lou Cornum about terminology—Indian versus “ndn” versus indigenous versus Native American—and it's definitely an object of discussion. It’s not really possible to write this history and treat the word “Indian” like a slur in all instances. I’m obviously not going to censor the name of the American Indian Movement. Also, frustratingly, I find American readers often do not understand “Native Californian” to mean “Indigenous Califonian.” You say “Native Californian” and a lot of people think Joan Didion.
At the same time, there's a bit of free indirect discourse where I'm talking about the colonial understanding of indigenous populations. I have enough faith in my readers to understand what I'm doing when I'm talking about the Hoover ideology being transported to South Africa and thinking about Black people in South Africa as Indians. What that meant for the mining capitalists to export that California model of Indian subjugation around the world.
“Indian” doesn't just mean indigenous to the American continents, it becomes this politicized term. It's difficult because you're dealing with so many people's specific histories—specific histories of ethnic groups that I don't belong to—but I tried to write the book as non-defensively as I could. I thought a lot about how to do the best work I could to illustrate these histories. That is what I really have to offer, and that was going to be better in the end, rather than writing defensively.
For example, I think I understand the arguments for capitalizing the racial identity “black,” and I often do so in my writing depending on the outlet’s standard practices, but in the book I chose not to in most instances, and that was mostly because there were pages where I used the word so much that capitalizing it began to read like a failed rhetorical attempt to substitute a stylistic choice for analysis. But it was a close call, and I can’t say for sure that it will end up being the right one.
I don't know how that's all gonna go, to be honest. Like when I'm talking about political differences within Japanese internment. Or the one Chinese professor and the one Japanese professor at Stanford getting into a fight, or portraying Japanese imperialism as a worse evil than American capitalism at a time in history, even though that was the line of the Japanese Americans that I'm quoting who lived at Stanford. That was their experience, and that was the story they're telling. I worry that some people will find that history politically inconvenient, but it’s important.
So we'll see. As always, again, I tried my best. It certainly was not my intent to offend anyone. I hope that's not how it ends up being read. There are a lot of places in the book where I took some risks in how I wrote about the conflicts, especially with ethnic conflict. I don't think I spared the Jews, certainly didn't spare the Irish. My people come in for just as much as anybody else.
It's hard. You’ve got to take some risks just to write for the public these days. And if people are offended by the way I use Indian to refer to indigenous people in the book, then I will hear that. It doesn't mean I will necessarily come to agree with them. But, if it's a common or well-argued perspective, then I probably would.
It’s not like I’m locked in my place. Writing is a dialectical process. Writing books is a little scarier because they print them on paper. And then you still have to go through the dialectical process.
RB: Circling back to a sentence in “Resolution,” the last chapter of the book, where you write, "those of us devoted to the earth certainly can't let it burn because we're not willing to make ourselves understood." I took that as a not-so-subtle call to arms, where you could change one letter in this chapter's title and it'd read the same. What lengths do we, those who will inherit the earth, need to go in order to be heard?
MH: In the final acknowledgment, I say that the book is dedicated to the earth and its people and their preservation by any means necessary.
Bruce Franklin is, in some ways, a moral core of the book. He's another one, in the long legacy of California communists, who doesn’t get as much credit as he deserves for his theoretical contributions to American leftism. He's way up there, and Franklin and the Bay Area militants come to a deep understanding of the intractability of the capitalist system. They get pushed into this place where they realize they have to fight. And I'm not sure what theoretical advancement we've made since then.
A lot of the New Left stuff that I quote in that section is directly apposite for our current situation, and the conclusion is a throwback to that moment in history. When I wrote my first book, my line was like, "things are gonna get way worse, way faster than we think they're gonna get." And things got way worse, way faster than I thought they were gonna get. I look back and I'm like, "this was optimistic." For my whole career, writing professionally for the public, which is my whole working life, I've been on the far end of "things are gonna get worse, and faster than we're ready for." And I've felt constantly unprepared for the degree to which that becomes the case.
You'd have to go pretty far to find people who accurately perceived how this last decade was going to go, the last five years, even. It's obvious, and it's incontestable. Facing this situation, we need to really ask ourselves that if our movement is constrained, by what? What are the stakes of our situation?
I have a hard time with a certain liberal strain of people who think humans only have 100 years left on the earth, but the Constitution is gonna last forever. It's like, well...
RB: ...For who?
MH: Right, exactly. They believe in these ideas without attaching them to the concrete processes that are rendering those ideas impossible.
When I look at people’s lives these days, their outcomes seem really binary. Either they have more resources than they know what to do with and maybe they feel bad about it, or they’re barely scraping by. There are increasingly few people in the middle of that, and that's going to get worse as we go. But it's definitely already happened. And is continually happening.
RB: Towards the end of the book, you describe Peter Thiel as “the son of resentful losers.” Even so, his tenure advising the Trump Administration was quite consequential and his perspective (money) is becoming ubiquitous in the minds (pockets) of Republicans. Looking at the upcoming general election cycle, do you foresee a champion of the left able to overcome what's happening on the right, regarding an affinity for crazed oligarchs and fascism-lite policies?
MH: I'm withholding official predictions on this next cycle, because I don't know what the fuck. If I had to guess—because it seems to be going the stupidest way possible—I really think it'll be Trump versus Biden again.
No matter which way that goes, it gets worse, right?
RB: If we burn just the oil that we have in reserves, we're fucked. The oil that's already out of the ground. And both parties seem committed to doing so.
MH: Well, and that's the thing, at some point, we need a dominant institution to act contrary to its near-term profit interest, right? You need someone to say, "We're not going to burn this oil, we're going to put it back." And there is no institution in America with the capability to do that. There may be no institution in the world with the capability to do that. Maybe the Chinese Communist Party is able to make that kind of decision...
So for decision makers to be holding on to the kind of decision-making power that they are holding, knowing that they can't make the decisions necessary to avoid planetary catastrophe, they’re the custodians of planetary catastrophe up and down the list. That's the job they're auditioning for. They don't want to solve the problem.
RB: Given your global historical perspective, how severe does a climate or cultural event have to be to inspire a mass popular movement, like a general strike? How bad might things get before people are called to combat such nearsightedness?
MH: Look, in 2020, if 10 police stations go up instead of one, we're living in a different country right now. That’s not the end of any story, that’s not a solution, but it is a fact. If we're looking for the deus ex machina that's gonna come and change the balance of social forces—not to say that that’s what we should be looking for—we witnessed the largest uprising in the history of this country less than three years ago. I was there, it was crazy.
I've never seen shit like that, and I've been in the streets at political demonstrations since I was 12. And no one who's had that same period of experience in America has ever seen anything like that. It's very easy to be pessimistic, and to some degree I think you have to be, analytically. But politically, I'm still an optimist, and I believe that people will rise.