“[The] development of the West is being predicated on fragmentary information, improvised planning, and the opportunistic promotion of ‘projects.'” So wrote the late, great writer and journalist Carey McWilliams in 1949. He concludes his book, “California: The Great Exception,” with this sentence:
California needs men and women who can see beyond its mountains; who can see the entire West, and realize that, as with all good things, there comes a time when the gold runs out, when the exception disappears in the rule, and when California … must, indeed put on knowledge with its power and adopt, as an official policy, the same generous open-handedness with which its magic mountains have showered benefits on those lucky people, the Californians.
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