The Ugly Truth





19 March 2011
Why Napa Sucks! Part One: History, Demographics and Location

How did Napa become a grim, picture-pretty place, where public dancing is outlawed, you face a $3000 fine for cutting your weeds, and complaining to a public servant will get you charged with assault? I don't know exactly, but generally speaking, it's all about government bureaucracy and insatiable hunger for power over people and their money.

You know that wretched Southern Town of stereotype, with a Boss Hawg for Sheriff who can lynch whomever he wants as long as he keeps the former slave-holders happy? That's Napa County, just under the surface of the false sophistication and phonier smiles.

Correlation does not amount to causation, but in trying to determine why Napa County sucks so much, certain historical factors unique to Napa do provide hints of things to come.

Few towns in California have lineages reaching as far back. Napa can claim the first real American community in the State, beginning when pioneers arrived in the early 1840s; previously, every town in the State owed its founding to Spain. Most of the newcomers settled between St. Helena and Calistoga, and early residents played key roles in the great events leading to California's separation from Mexico and absorption by the United States.

They built the first grain and lumber mills, they helped relieve the Donner Party in the snowbound Sierras, men from Napa played a prominent role in the Bear Flag Rebellion.

The town was founded just before gold was discovered in 1848, and while Napa suffered a brief emptying as locals headed to the gold fields with the first wave, the town quickly became a raucous winter resort in the off-season. And since the Valley had already established itself as a farming community, Napa County served as one of the earliest provisioning points in the State; its bounty fed miners and their animals, its lumber built Benicia and San Francisco.

That early recognition of Napa's fertility and beauty may be its curse. Some of the greatest mountain men--George Yount was one--settled in this Valley after literally walking across the Continent. Others succumbed too, and miners passing through during the Gold Rush returned.

Squatting on others' land became epidemic, and titles were doubtful because of the Mexican land grants and the loose deals made in the early days. New laws threw everything into confusion; litigation flourished. The once famous Soda Springs Resort endured 20 years of land seizures, beatings, burnings and law suits before someone finally got clear title in the early 1870s. The vagaries concerning land law crippled growth until the turn of the Century.

The town has one of the longest running municipal structures, and it early claimed the distinction of the State's only judicial lynching and murder. In 1851, after a killer was convicted in Napa but pardoned by the Governor, the town conspired to delay the messenger so it could hang their man after dark. The incident almost provoked a local civil war.

From the beginning, Napa evolved as a tight-knit community of willful people determined to do what it wants, as a community, outside opinions be damned.

Transitions

By the mid-1870s, Napa had become an agricultural star, pioneering new practices for orchards and vineyards, replacing the once ubiquitous wheat. Grandees from San Francisco developed great estates, others came to the Valley's resorts. Large amounts of outside money came to the County, making local farmers compete for available property with some of the richest people in the world, as well as cope with the distortions intrinsic to the situation.

Then the State built an insane asylum here in 1875, a huge boost to the local economy. It also predictably attracted half the nut jobs in California. As a result, this one, small, beautiful valley could claim an oddly segmented population, comprised of a core of rugged pioneers and their descendents; rich, absentee landowners; mental defectives; and a variety of parasites determined to prey on the rest.

Many of the latter took to government, and the failed water schemes, railroad schemes, and land schemes were a source of local scandal for decades, all based on public subsidies and someone else's free money, usually taypayers.'

During this same period, Napa claimed an outsized amount of political clout because of a cabal of Republicans led by Senator John Miller. With associates, notably Gustave Niebaum, he took over Alaska for two decades, profits helping to build Inglenook Winery and the property that became Silverado Resort. After Miller died, in 1886, the Valley suffered from his loss; Eastern bourbon distillers avoided the new federal taxes that would crush the brandy industry in Miller's absence. That crippled the wine business worse than the phyloxera epidemic.

The Valley's fortunes declined as wineries struggled against outside events, and new resorts attracted the wealthy. After Prohibition, everything got even worse. And then came the Depression. But Napa still had the insane asylum and all those State jobs.

It's a history of self-reliant people buffeted by great external forces and a boom and bust economy. The County also learned how convenient it is to have a large public institution around, a source of money independent of the local private sector. Businesses come and go, but bureaucracies live on forever.

Demographic Shifts

Napa displayed a mosaic of all the ethnicites that came to California. By century's end, the population comprised every kind of American from North and South, with Frenchmen, Brits, Italians, Irishmen, Germans, Mexicans, Indians, Chinese and blacks thrown into the mix. But it was overwhelmingly white and European in heritage.

World War Two changed the mix when thousands of poor, rural Southerners, black and white, came to Northern California to work in the shipyards. And though there had always been something of an assimilated black population in the Bay Area, the war brought new numbers that substantially changed the racial landscape, especially in Oakland, Richmond and Vallejo.

Few found their way to Napa because the white Southerners staked a claim in the new post-war tracts just inside Napa County. Rancho del Mar--now American Canyon--was probably the first anti-black bastion in the County, reinforced as others of the mostly Appalachian stock found homes closer to the town of Napa. A scrappy, contentious lot, they brought to the Valley the same stubborn mean-spiritedness that characterized the feud-prone hollows they escaped.

The war also brought new Mexicans to Napa, legacy of the guestworker programs to harvest crops while Americans fought. Some stayed, though in insignificant numbers.

The explosion in the Mexican population began in the late 1960s, with rejuvenation of the wine industry; within a decade they replaced Anglo construction workers, then the Anglo teenagers working in the fast-food joints. Many illegal, they now constitute more than 40 percent of the population, a majority of school children, and they've overwhelmed social service agencies.

Concurrently, the winery count ballooned from a dozen to almost a thousand, fostering a new tourist and resort industry, accompanied by armies of new rich and their toadies. As in the past, large amounts of outside money flooded into the Valley, swamping it with inflated prices, flakey economies and every variety of "World Class" pretension.

Geographical Isolation

Napa began as a self-contained land apart, and despite proximity to a thriving Bay Area, it has remained the closest, yet most insular, enclave of the hinterlands. The community established its own strong, provincial values in isolation, and ever since it's maintained them with a minimum of scrutiny by outsiders.

Despite Napa's early prominence in the State's history, the County is a dead-end to nowhere, and it never fully participated in the life of the Bay Area. Indeed, it's the only so-called Bay Area county that is not really on the Bay.

The only sizable town, Napa, is also the county seat, concentrating economic, political and administrative control to a degree unknown by neighboring counties. It's tucked away in a narrow valley, hemmed in by two great mountain ridges of the Coast Range, a maze of sloughs and wetlands embracing the one opening to the south. On the west side of the Bay, Napa was separated from San Francisco by the Petaluma River and the Golden Gate, to the east by the Carquinez Straits and the Bay itself. Even when efficient ferry service bracketed the Bay, it took an hour to get from Napa to Vallejo, the real beginning of the journey to San Francisco.

Today, Napa County is still uniquely restricted in terms of transportation; there are perhaps five miles of freeway within the County, and no freeway actually goes to Napa. No place in the Bay Area is remotely comparable. This isn't just a matter of moving people around, but rather goods and services. Simple transportation costs and difficulties have made integration into the larger economy impossible.

Historically speaking, not only did workers have to live in Napa--it was too far from anywhere else for commuting--whatever was produced had to be based on Napa's singular advantages. These were overwhelmingly rural in character: fruit, grain, wine, sheep and cattle. The first three died slow deaths along with the Nineteenth Century, and the sheep and cattle disappeared in the 1960s and '70s. Until then, the animals accounted for our one real manufacturing industry, finished leather goods. When that business evaporated, we were left with cows for beef, the County's major agricultural product until the mid-'70s, when wine made its modern comeback. Along with that scourge of "Tourism."

Every other county on the San Francisco Bay is part of the larger region, and is interconnected with every other part to some degree. From San Francisco To San Jose, Santa Rosa to Sausalito, Vacaville to Oakland, Oakland to San Jose, there are dozens of communities in between. Each county claims numerous sizable towns, all linked by commerce, school districts, sewer systems, major highways.

Such connections moderate regional extremes. You can't be too eccentric, or the neighbors will notice and respond. None of that applies to Napa, and the discrepancy has become progressively worse over time.

So, What?

All these factors have created an atmosphere of dysfunction unique to Napa County. A community of rugged individuals created the world they wanted in isolation, and powerful municipal governments that reflected their values. I think we have a situation in which the population and its values have fragmented dramatically over the years, the popular will more nebulous than ever. Meanwhile, local governments have expanded their reach to an extraordinary degree by catering to those constituencies they choose to recognize, to the exclusion of others.

Nothing accounts more for this than the explosion of Federal Government with World War Two, and its acceptance as the new normal. No county in the State has a deeper history than Napa, and that includes its discovery that when local resources fail, you can milk the public sector. While Napa's private industries have lurched along over the years, it was the State Hospital, then the State Veterans Home, that supplied the bulk of jobs, later supplemented by Vallejo's federal shipyard at Mare Island. Napa bureaucrats had long experienced the benefits of government, and they were especially well-prepared to exploit its explosive growth and warp it to their own ends.

Local governments don't need to depend on local taxpayers anymore for their pet schemes, big ideas, bigger budgets; just concoct a plan to fit the free money available, supplied by other taxpayers somewhere else. There is never any accountability, and I'm not aware of any town anywhere ever being punished for wasting money, except in terms of getting a little less to waste in the future. Maybe.

Local voters never know what's really going on, and it doesn't matter if they do, because so many Napa voters receive paychecks from those same multitudinous government entitites handing out the money. A huge portion of locals are active or retired Federal, State or municipal employees, many working for agencies that hand out free money not only for so-called public works projects, but also to the community, meaning a wide variety of free-loading individuals and non-profit programs to serve them.

Regardless of how they identify themselves on the political spectrum, all these people agree that they want more free tax-payer money for their best friends and relatives, however defined.

The genuinely productive people of Napa are a struggling minority. It would be enough to suffer the loss of their money to various parasites, but those same parasites actively attack them, not only stealing their money, but making it difficult--if not impossible--to make money. Which attracts even more rapacious attention from the parasites.

If you don't like it, you can leave Napa County, or suffer. But you do not complain very loudly, because they'll fine you, beat you, jail you or kill you.

Nobody will notice or care very much, because that's just the way things are done in Napa, and you should have known better.

That's the greatest tragedy of all. A valley once home to the most enterprising people in the world has replaced them with docile slaves who hate freedom almost as much as their bureaucratic overlords do.

You people out in the world don't notice because of that insularity, masked by the glad-handing boosters desperately trying to make a buck from wine or tourism. And when you do notice, you really don't.

People just can't believe what they see with their own eyes. It sucks that bad.

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