David Rapp's "Tinker to Evers to Chance"

David Rapp has been a political journalist and publishing executive in Washington, DC, for more than thirty years. He is the former editor of Congressional Quarterly, as well as the author of How the U.S. Got into Agriculture—and Why It Can’t Get Out.

Rapp applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Tinker to Evers to Chance: The Chicago Cubs and the Dawn of Modern America, and reported the following:

From page 99, a passage from Chapter 5, “Baseball Revival: 1903-1905” (I include a paragraph from the page before and one from the page after to round out the context):

Anyone who knew the recent history of the Chicago Nationals had no reason to think this season would bring any better fortune than the previous year. No new stars had been signed, no budding prospects had risen above the pack of greenhorns. “[The] club this year as compared with last season is fully 50 percent better,” allowed a Chicago Daily News correspondent, already hedging his bet. The manager “expressed great satisfaction with the looks of his men,” reported a noncommittal Chicago Record Herald. The Sporting Life weekly took note of the general drift and concluded that the Nationals “are a nice, willing set of boys, but seem rather weak with the war club.”

And yet a writer in another Chicago paper proffered a much sunnier outlook. “This has been a great day for the Colts,” beamed the anonymous dispatch in the Chicago Inter Ocean, using that paper’s preferred nickname for the team. “To begin with, the weather was just ideal for ball playing. The day was warm, with just a light breeze blowing across the park to remind them of their proximity to the coast.” The sentences were cheerful, confident, and no doubt naive, yet their forecast for Chicago and its frigid sports fans concealed an uncanny feminine intuition of better days to come.

Most Chicago baseball fans had few reasons to expect the summer to be one of joy and celebration. Their team had finished fifth in the eight- team league in 1902, another in a string of sixteen lackluster campaigns. No trophy had fallen into the team’s clutches since 1886. It was going to be a challenge to recapture the public’s interest in the bedraggled Colts or the sullied game of baseball itself. An even bigger leap was to win back the city’s faith and allegiance.

James A. Hart, the club’s owner and president, was keen to try. Hart had made the arrangements for the West Coast trip, his first spring training since taking sole financial control of the franchise the previous summer. His longtime boss and mentor, sporting goods magnate Albert G. Spalding, was now out of the picture. Hart had decided to make the expensive excursion to the far west—the longest train trip ever for a baseball team in that day—to help revive the players’ spirits and jump-start the team’s prospects. Perhaps he also wanted to show he was no longer Spalding’s lackey but finally a baseball magnate of his own accord. Either way, Hart needed to raise the city’s low expectations for this moribund franchise.

Frank G. Selee, Hart’s field manager, came aboard the year before with a stellar reputation as a talent scout and turnaround artist. Hart gave Selee complete freedom to remake the roster. They assembled seventeen players in Santa Monica, a motley crew from all corners of the nation. Among them were several holdovers—including a slick infielder named Tinker from Kansas City, and a sturdy backup catcher named Chance from California, plus a more recent pickup from upstate New York whom everyone called Little Evers.

Selee had played this rebuilding role before, a dozen years previous, when he lifted the Boston Nationals from fifth to first in just one year. And he had a brainy, methodical way of going about the task. He collected these and other prospects like marbles, tossing away the rejects and, wherever possible, buffing up the hidden jewels. “You must be on the lookout for new material all the time,” he said. At the end of the day, however, few seasoned baseball watchers expected any miracles from such a nondescript outfit. The restoration of Chicago’s baseball fortunes was going to be a long, hard slog.

I like this passage because it weaves together four of the key themes of my book:

1. The revival of the Chicago National League franchise led by the little-known Frank Selee—this chapter includes the only extensive biographical treatment of a baseball mastermind (and ultimately tragic figure) who finally made it into the Hall of Fame in 1999.
2. I foreshadow the introduction of his “secret weapon,” as I called her later: Selee’s wife, Bridget “May” Grant, an Irish lass of unbounded enthusiasm and remarkable brains for baseball. (It’s revealed later that she was the anonymous correspondent behind the optimistic spring training dispatch.)
3. I touch upon baseball’s “sullied” reputation from the 1890s, hinting at the Cubs’ impending revival and their role in bringing the game back to social respectability and acceptance.
4. Here’s the first assembly of my three protagonists, who up to this point I had written about as young boys on the rise in distinct and very different regions of 19th century America.

So, while my Page 99, in and of itself, may come across as a rather serviceable passage in the overall narrative of the book, it does provide an essential purpose in alerting the reader to several of the larger biographical and cultural topics to come.

Visit David Rapp's website.

Writers Read: David Rapp.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul K. MacDonald & Joseph M. Parent's "Twilight of the Titans"

Paul K. MacDonald, an associate professor of political science at Wellesley College, is author of Networks of Domination. Joseph M. Parent, an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, is author of Uniting States and coauthor of American Conspiracy Theories. They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford issued this advice as a quick way to cut out the middlemen and sidestep publishing houses’ public relations departments. In our case, the page 99 test is a fair representation of our style and substance, but then we also penned the material on the jacket. Yet page 99 is a fascinating Fordian prism that reveals how strong hindsight bias is, and how that might blind us to our present possibilities.

Of course, Ford was not his real surname. He changed it to Ford after the First World War because Hueffer sounded too German (his father’s family was from Westphalia; his mother’s from London). And everyone knows about the longstanding antipathy between Germany and the United Kingdom, which contributed to war’s outbreak in 1914. Yet this too is not necessarily so.

Our book is about how states deal with decline, specifically when they fall a notch in the great power pecking order. The conventional wisdom on the subject is pessimistic: either great powers fall into a hostility spiral that tends to end in war, like Athens and Sparta did in the Peloponnesian War, or domestic dysfunction hampers their ability to adjust strategically, like the brittle collapse of the Soviet Union. We argue that logic and evidence suggest the opposite: declining states tend to retrench promptly, proportionately, and peacefully. They do this to stay strategically solvent, reducing their foreign policy costs, revamping their institutions, and redistributing their resources and commitments to be more competitive in the long run.

On page 99, we’re discussing how the United Kingdom reacted to the expensive win in the South African War in a surprising manner. Rather than crow about victory or carry on with business as usual, leaders from both parties cut defense costs, closed peripheral military bases, concentrated resources at home, made new friends abroad, and put a premium on efficiency. This was not primarily aimed at Germany until much later - even after the Anglo-German naval arms race, the British were not intent on fighting Germany - but it gained the United Kingdom much needed strength at critical strongpoints, better prospects for long-term economic growth, and strategic flexibility across its empire. Had leaders not acted with such agility and alacrity then, World War I could have ended much differently, and Ford’s last name might still be Hueffer.

These debates about decline echo today as many people aspire to make America great again. Torn between earlier commitments and current challenges, the United States is ambivalent about whether to double down on the status quo or place new bets. Even if change were desirable, many doubt that the country can overcome its inertia and internal squabbles. Our book is the first to look at all states in such situations since 1870, when reliable data becomes available for the great powers, and shows what combinations of policies tend to bring about desirable outcomes in different conditions. It showcases promising paths to recovery and catastrophic courses to avoid. It offers reasons for hope and optimism. Just not all on page 99.

Learn more about Twilight of the Titans at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Bessner's "Democracy in Exile"

Daniel Bessner is the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual, and reported the following:

In Democracy in Exile, I examine the intellectual trajectory of Hans Speier, a German exile from National Socialism who in the United States became the founding chief of the RAND Corporation’s Social Science Division. In brief, the book is dedicated to explaining why Speier and other intellectuals of his generation left the groves of academe to enter the halls of power.

One of the main takeaways of the book is that processes outside of intellectuals’ control often informed their careers. Page 99 expresses this well. On this and the subsequent two pages, which comprise the end of my third chapter, I discuss the ways in which two Democratic congressmen, Martin Dies (TX) and Eugene Cox (GA), used their positions of power to demolish the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS), the government agency for which Speier worked between 1942 and 1944. (Specifically, Speier served as the head of the committee that produced analyses of Nazi propaganda.)

Dies and Cox both had personal vendettas against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the FBIS’s parent agency. The anti-New Deal Dies considered the FCC a mouthpiece of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while Cox hated the commission because it was investigating him for corruption. For these reasons, the two representatives were devoted to crushing the FCC, which they eventually did by fostering its financial evisceration. As a result of its loss of funding, the FCC was forced to reduce significantly the FBIS’s staff and operations.

The attenuation of the FBIS compelled Speier to leave the organization to accept a job as head of the Office of War Information’s (OWI) German desk. In this position, Speier was responsible for developing the propaganda directives intended to guide the materials the OWI sent to Germany. In short, Speier, a German exile, was given the opportunity to psychologically manipulate his former countrymen. This position further enabled Speier to build the contacts and reputation that helped him later join RAND. Thus, while Speier was disappointed he had to leave the FBIS, Dies’s and Cox’s crusades helped launch his career as a Cold War “defense intellectual.”

It is impossible to know for certain what would have happened if Speier had ended the war at the FBIS, but to my mind it is unlikely that he would have reached the career heights he did. In this particular instance, then, the machinations of two disgruntled congressmen created the conditions that (eventually) enabled Speier to become one of the most important defense intellectuals in the Cold War United States.

Visit Daniel Bessner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heather Widdows's "Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal"

Heather Widdows is the John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.

Widdows applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal, and reported the following:

The demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today’s visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly being perfect has become and ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or failure. There are numerous consequences of the emergence of beauty as an ethical ideal - many are harmful as we suffer an epidemic of body image anxiety and engage in increasingly demanding and risky practices – simply to feel good enough, to feel normal. If trajectories continue and we do nothing to stop the rising demands the future will be bleak indeed. Yet there are positive aspects of the beauty ideal not least it is embodied and recognises we are situated in bodies which are key to how we understand and express ourselves. The first two arguments of the book claim that beauty is first and ethical ideal and second that it is global. Page 99 comes at the end of these arguments having argued that “the demandingness, and likely future demandingness, of the ideal is particularly troubling in light of the growing dominance of the ideal and its increasingly ethical nature.” It then goes on to begin what will become a claim that there is nothing ‘routine’ about daily beauty practices and it is easy to gradually move from the hairdresser to the clinic, and that we should rethink the assumptions we have about surgery being different from other beauty practices. On page 99 I being the description of routine beauty practices:

Routine practices include the daily application of lotions and potions. These have to be purchased and then used in the correct layered order; in itself a costly and time consuming business which has to be learned. For example, a standard beauty routine might be to maintain skin health using lotions, which may include the use of products in turn: cleanser, toner, serum, moisturiser, eye cream, BB/CC cream and primer. Having prepared and protected the skin then you are ready to apply make-up. The daily application of make-up is done by very many women, and again, requires the application of products in the correct way. Putting on ‘your face’ standardly requires the use of some or all of these products – foundation, powder, blusher, eye shadow, eye liner, mascara, lipstick – sometimes less, sometimes more and perhaps most for the contoured ‘natural look’.

I then go on to argue that under the beauty ideal the self is located in the body, but not just in the actual flawed body. It is also in the transforming body, a body of potential and possibility, and the imagined body, full of promise, the Perfect Me. The final arguments of the book are about choice, and why is it that we say we choose to engage and yet feel we have to.

Learn more about Perfect Me at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward G. Goetz's "The One-Way Street of Integration"

Edward G. Goetz is the Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota, and co-Director of the University-Metropolitan Consortium. He has published widely, including New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy.

Goetz applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The One-Way Street of Integration: Fair Housing and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in American Cities, and reported the following:

My book is about the problematic ways that we pursue racial residential integration in the U.S. In the book I argue, as others have before me, that integration efforts have been and will continue to be an ineffective way of achieving racial justice in America.

Page 99 of The One-Way Street of Integration provides an illustration of at least two of the arguments that underpin my case. The page begins mid-sentence, describing the aborted effort during the Nixon Administration in the early 1970s to force predominantly white suburban communities to accept federally subsidized housing. Nixon’s activist-HUD Secretary, George Romney (Mitt’s father), aggressively pursued the integration of suburban communities by attempting to sanction exclusionary suburbs that refused to accept low-cost, HUD-subsidized housing. His efforts triggered a predictable white-backlash, ironically erupting in his home-state of Michigan, against such a heavy-handed approach. In the face of this white, suburban backlash, Nixon quickly marginalized Romney and undercut his initiative. The agency’s bold integration effort was over.

The bottom half of the page notes that the leaders of black communities in American cities were not even very supportive of Romney’s initiative, seeing in it a flow of housing investment away from central cities and into suburban communities, a flow that would further impoverish those cities and benefit very few black families in the end.

The rest of the book presents a larger set of arguments regarding integration efforts, as well as a historical overview of how this issue has been manifest in U.S. housing policy since the 1940s. Integration efforts are generally contrasted with ‘community development’ efforts that focus instead on building community power as a means of attaining greater racial justice.

The book argues that integration efforts accept white racism and build policy efforts to accommodate that racism. Integration efforts place the burden for integration on people of color, requiring that they accept the difficulties of moving into often hostile communities, but doing so in small enough numbers not to trigger white flight. Thus, integration efforts both mandate that people of color be minorities in all of the communities in which they live, and they elevate the ‘mostly white’ neighborhood as the ideal. Integration is too often defined as that degree of diversity that whites will tolerate. In contrast, community building approaches focus on strengthening the economic and political capacities of communities of color, an approach to racial justice that is not based on accommodating white racism.

Learn more about The One-Way Street of Integration at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: New Deal Ruins.

--Marshal Zeringue

Harold J. Cook's "The Young Descartes"

Harold J. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He is author of several books on the early modern period, including Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age and Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London. His recent work has focused mainly on the global entanglements of science and medicine, politics, and economies.

Cook applied the “Page 99 Test” and the Page 69 Test to his new book, The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War, and reported the following:

Some years ago, this site's editor kindly invited me to take what was then the page 69 test, which I thought worked well for uncovering a quick understanding of the argument of my book. It is now the page 99 test. So when invited this time, I compared the two pages of my The Young Descartes, and found that in this case page 69 spoke more clearly than page 99.

Against the common mythology of Descartes as a loner, the book shows instead that he could have stepped from the pages of The Three Musketeers. I have no brief against the position that the writings of Descartes were fundamental in helping to lay down the foundations of modern philosophy, and possibly of modern science. In fact, I admire many of his works. But I have come to see his views not as rising above his world but as emerging from it. He was good with the sword, trained in military engineering, and a lover of both men and women, passionately engaged with life. When he wrote his chief works, however, he did so not in France but in the Dutch Republic. The reason was, I think, that he had become an exile. His early life explains why that might have been so, thereby illuminating the kind of people and problems that shaped his understanding.

But to get back to particulars: If we turn to page 99 of the book, we find passages about what might have been the motivations taking Descartes to the coronation of the Emperor in Frankfurt, and from there further into Germany in the opening stages of the 30 Years War. It is a page that probably would not make sense without having read the pages beforehand that set it up.

Page 69, however, introduces the event of 1617 that caused Descartes (then age 21) to give up hope of patronage from among the great nobles of France: the assassination of Queen Marie de Medici’s favorite at the behest of her son, who thereby became King Louis XIII. The coup caused the former queen to flee Paris. So did Descartes.

There is also a passing reference on the page to Marie de Rohan, later the duchesse du Chevreuse, one of the most intriguing and powerful women of the day. Her son would later translate Descartes’s Meditations from Latin into French, with the author’s help. I would like to think that the philosopher knew her, too.

So I have to conclude that in this case the page 69 test works better than the page 99 test.

Learn more about The Young Descartes at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michele Dillon's "Postsecular Catholicism"

Michele Dillon is Class of 1944 Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Postsecular Catholicism: Relevance and Renewal, and reported the following:

Page 99 in Postsecular Catholicism happens to pinpoint the book’s central argument: the necessity – and the tensions - in Catholicism between maintaining continuity with its doctrinal tradition and simultaneously being open to embracing new directions so that it can maintain relevance amid societal change. Page 99 is from chapter 5 where, focusing on the U.S. bishops’ religious freedom campaign, I argue that the bishops’ turn to contraception and religious freedom “is interesting from a postsecular perspective because it illuminates both the secular openness of the Church and the limits to that openness.” What I mean by this is that prior to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) contraception mandate, church officials largely ignored Catholics’ use of artificial contraception despite its prohibition by church teaching. Their relative silence showed tacit acceptance of the fact that Catholics incorporate their (secular) lived experiences and expectations into their Catholicism, something further evident in Catholics’ engagement in and/or support for gay marriage, and for divorce and remarriage without an annulment. This epitomizes the postsecular reality: the mutual relevance and intermeshing of both religious belief and secular experience in individual lives and in civil society. Recognition of their entanglement is well captured by Pope Francis. He frequently emphasizes that doctrinal ideas should be in ongoing conversation with secular realities. Yet the U.S. bishops (and others) remain leery of secularism. And they strategically used the ACA mandate as a political and legal opportunity to push back not against contraception per se, but against secularism and more specifically, the growing acceptance by Catholics and others of same-sex marriage, a turn which they see as severely undermining church teachings on marriage (and on sexual difference). The bishops’ campaign highlights the limits both in the secular understanding of religion and in the church’s ability to negotiate secular expectations especially in the realm of sex and gender. Yet, as the recent Synod on the Family showed, it is possible to use existing church doctrine to forge a new understanding that is more inclusive of diverse and increasingly secularized sexual relationships and families.

Learn more about Postsecular Catholicism at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Ramirez's "Destined for Greatness"

Michael Ramirez is an associate professor of sociology at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Destined for Greatness: Passions, Dreams, and Aspirations in a College Music Town, and reported the following:

Destined for Greatness investigates how men and women successfully pursue informal music careers in the iconic Athens, Georgia. It is largely a life course study that retrospectively examines musicians’ early experiences in life to explain how they commit to music in adulthood. Page 99 falls in Chapter 3 of the book, which examines the processes of adopting a musician identity.

What page 99 illustrates well is the challenge musicians face in committing to musical careers upon their entrance to adulthood. Music tends not to pay the bills, so musicians of course have “other jobs” outside of music. Page 99 is the ideal page to situate the types of jobs that allow or prevent flexibility with musical commitments. Some musicians are able to situate their work commitments into their musical pursuits with little tension. Other musicians, however, due to the context and time intensity of their jobs have difficulty balancing work with music. One outcome for these musicians is the consideration of downgrading their commitment to music for a more normative adulthood. In some ways, page 99 highlights one of the driving themes of the book as a whole: musicians must reconcile issues of adulthood, in this case employment, to successfully fit music into their adult lives.

The book can be read as a love story that musicians tell of their devotion to music. And like any good love story, it is one fraught with struggle, with questions of whether it is worth the sacrifice, yet ultimately framed as entirely worthwhile and as providing meaning in life.

Learn more about Destined for Greatness at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keith Gandal's "War Isn’t the Only Hell"

Keith Gandal is a professor of English at City College of New York. He is the author of The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization.

Gandal applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, War Isn't the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature, and reported the following:

War Isn’t the Only Hell attempts to put American World War I literature in its proper historical context. It also tries to expand the canon, beyond the work of famous Lost-Generation authors Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Cummings, and Katherine Anne Porter. Our sense of American Great War writing--and thus of the American experience--is limited and misguided. Unlike every other combatant nation, our lasting literature was written entirely by noncombatants; moreover, we don’t understand what it meant to be an American noncombatant male and why Lost-Generation writing is the way it is.

American World War I literature has long been interpreted as an alienated outcry against modern warfare and propaganda. This reading ignores the US army’s unprecedented attempt, during the war, to assign men—except, notoriously, African Americans—to positions and ranks based on merit. And it misses the fact that the culture granted masculinity only to combatants, while noncombatants experienced a different alienation: shame.

Drawing on military archives and current historical research, the book discusses the work of thirteen significant writers: as responses to the shocks of war and meritocracy. The supposedly antiwar texts of the social-privileged male Lost-Generation authors addressed—often in coded ways—noncombatant frustrations. Meanwhile, the hard-hitting works of combat soldiers William March, Thomas Boyd, Laurence Stallings, and Hervey Allen were partly shaped by experiences of meritocratic recognition, especially meaningful for socially disadvantaged men.

Even the sole World War I novel by an African American veteran, Victor Daly, reveals a mixed experience of army discrimination and empowerment among the French. Finally, three women authors—Porter, Willa Cather, and Ellen La Motte, a frontline nurse—saw the war create new opportunities, prerogatives, and obligations for women. Ultimately, this literature registered the ways in which innovative military practices and a foreign war unsettled traditional American hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender, and even race.

The Page 99 Test has limited applicability here, as this page concludes a chapter that shows how Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms appealed to noncombatants. It still concerns one of our literary giants.

Most of the book is dedicated to less familiar writers. Its title comes from Daly, who covertly tells a taboo racial story that has been largely missed by critics. During this centennial of American involvement in the war, I suggest we broaden our canon so this long-forgotten American war becomes a major cultural touchstone.

Learn more about War Isn't the Only Hell at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Vogel's "California Greenin'"

David Vogel is professor emeritus in the Haas School of Business and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, California Greenin': How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader, and reported the following:

Page 99 of California Greenin’ describes the opposition of local governments and business firms to one of California’s most important environmental initiatives, namely the establishment of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. The world’s first coastal development agency which was made permanent in 1969 the Commission was given planning authority over all developments within 100 feet of the Bay’s shoreline. Its enactment by the California state legislature was the culmination of an extensive grassroots campaign by the Save Our Bay Action Committee, comprised of citizens who wanted to stop the beautiful San Francisco Bay from being rapidly filled it. Since western settlement, the amount of open water in the Bay had been reduced by more than 300 square miles while less of a quarter of the original tidal marshlands that had surrounded the Bay remained. Without strong and effective government regulation, one of California’s best known natural features would have continued to shrink.

The Commission’s establishment represents one of several important and innovative environmental initiatives in California that are described and explained in the book. They include the nation’s first protected wilderness area in Yosemite (1864), three large national parks to protect the sequoias in the Sierras, (1890), the nation’s first emissions standards for pollutants from motor vehicles (1964) and the California Coastal Commission (1976). More recently California has led the United States in issuing energy efficiency standards for appliances, buildings and motor vehicles and in addressing the risks of global climate change.

The book argues that California’s long history of environmental policy leadership is linked to three factors. First, many citizens have effectively supported regulations to protect the state’s unusually attractive but also highly vulnerable natural environment from destructive economic developments. Second, these citizen efforts have often been backed by business firms who benefiting by putting California on a “greener” growth trajectory. Thus both steamship firms and the Southern Pacific Railroad lobbied to protect California’s wilderness areas in order to promote tourism in the state, while the real estate industry in Los Angeles supported pollution control regulations to improve the city’s deteriorating air quality. Third, California has developed a regulatory bureaucracy that has enabled the state to develop and enforce its own environmental regulations - often independent of the federal government. Its effective and extensive environmental regulations has enabled California to remain a “golden state.”

Learn more about California Greenin' at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Politics of Precaution.

--Marshal Zeringue