“It was all orange groves then,” was a phrase I often heard from my grandfather, Judge Robert M. Letteau, during conversations about his childhood in various parts of Southern California. Letteau, who died at age 83 on December 18, 2025, had a life that in many ways reflected the changing nature of his native state, which has gone through unparalleled shifts over the past 80 years, serving as the vanguard of many forces (both good and bad) that have gripped American public life.
Judge Letteau was born on May 17, 1942, in Los Angeles, California, to George “Mason” Letteau and Georgann Gross. He was a third-generation Angeleno; his grandfather, George H. Letteau, moved to the area from the Midwest at the turn of the 20th century.
The state my grandfather was born into in 1942 was entirely alien to today’s California. The state had a total population just shy of 7 million, far short of today’s 39.5 million; Los Angeles County had a population of 2.7 million, compared to 10 million today. While California had a significant foreign-born population in 1942, at a little over 13 percent, it was still a small number compared to the 28 percent of the present day. In sharp contrast to modern California, and highlighting a significant change of the past 80 years, in 1942 the state was 90 percent white and just 6 percent of the population was Hispanic. Today the state is 38 to 44 percent white and 41.7 percent Hispanic.
In 1942, the state was on economic wartime footing. While the state was experiencing a manufacturing boom, it also imposed enforced blackouts (the late-war ones were some of my grandfather’s earliest memories). The conflict disrupted daily and family life; my grandfather’s father was absent, serving as a naval officer in the North African, Italian, and Pacific theaters during the war. Unlike other areas of the country, California profited immensely from the growth of industry and spending of the Second World War. “The war has caused us to actually jump into our future,” then-Governor Earl Warren wryly commented at the time, speaking of the rapid growth brought about by the conflict.
The state’s prosperity continued in the post-war years, with the state recording over 50 percent population growth between 1940 and 1950. Southern California was one of the beneficiaries of both the industrial demand created by the war and the semi-militarized nature of the American economy thereafter. Manufacturers and defense contractors flocked to areas such as California’s South Bay, or to Inglewood, where the Letteau family business, a cemetery, was located.
On the civilian side, California witnessed the growth of many culture-defining institutions and companies. It was the “Golden Age of Hollywood,” with the release of popular movies such as High Noon and Casablanca (both favorites of his). The Disneyland amusement park, which my grandfather visited on opening day (and tried to stay overnight in), was created for the state’s burgeoning number of middle-class families. At the same time, large swaths of Old California remained. The Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, was still predominantly rural, with Claremont, where my grandfather went to high school, remaining agricultural.
The state served as a microcosm of the broader U.S. in the 1960s, both witnessing a counterculture movement and the response to it through the law-and-order governorship of Ronald Reagan. This was the decade in which my grandfather very much came into his own, first attending Stanford University, then becoming a lawyer and becoming active in both law and politics. In this decade, he supported the gubernatorial campaign of Ronald Reagan, who would be his political hero for the rest of his life, as well as Richard Nixon’s successful presidential campaign.
In the 1970s, my grandfather became more involved in local politics in Inglewood, CA, and was twice elected to the city council. However, the 1970s saw a rapid decline in both the economic state of the area and the city’s public order. The breaking point was when my mother and her twin sister, both 6 years old and able to read at the time, were placed in a 5th grade public school classroom in Inglewood, where the bulk of the students were unable to read. They were the only white students in the class. Like many throughout the country during this time period, my grandfather understandably moved his family to an area with less crime and better public schools.
The decline of the state was interrupted in the 1980s. The 1980s saw the apogee of both the state’s place within the country and of my grandfather’s career, his appointment as a judge of the Los Angeles County Superior Court by Governor Jerry Brown. At the same time, Reagan was elected president twice by wide margins, bringing the agenda that he pioneered in California to the national level. Whatever the merits of Reagan and Reaganism, it is undeniable that the Reagan revolution captured the optimism that had earlier characterized midcentury California. He brought that optimism to the national stage in defiance of the downbeat atmosphere of the 1970s. This, even more so than policy, is the real reason why Reagan was so popular—people like my grandfather loved the idea of a return to prosperity, growth, and adventure. This optimism, more than anything, explains Reagan’s continued popularity among a certain generation of Americans, as well as the popularity of figures ranging from Barack Obama to Donald Trump.
The era of Californian optimism was short-lived. By the late 1980s, California institutions such as Stanford University (my grandfather’s alma mater) were already adopting curricula hostile towards American identity and Western civilization. Concurrent with the lurch towards postmodernism, immigration numbers (especially to California) began to rise. The remarkable growth and innovation of Silicon Valley in the 2000s (and the wealth it created) enabled the rulers of the state to adopt certain luxury beliefs, such as green-energy policies or identity politics, as state policy.
Savvy politicians capitalized on the segmentation of California into various ethnic identities, no longer promoting a unified, multiracial, “American” or “Californian” identity, but instead promoting niche ethnic identities for the many immigrant groups that entered the state after the 1960s. California’s ruling coalition of Democratic government officials, unions, and special business interests (such as Hollywood and Silicon Valley) reaped the rewards of this division, having created a permanent majority that would vote on account of ethnic patronage rather than ideology.
My grandfather loved the vibrancy of California and Los Angeles—from the number two special at El Coyote, to cheering on the Dodgers and Lakers, to bodyboarding (when he was younger) at lifeguard station number 28. He loved telling us all about how Los Angeles had changed throughout his lifetime—how the Beverly Center had replaced “Pony Land,” how he remembered the grand theaters showing movie premieres on Broadway, and how he learned how to swim by being pushed off the diving board at the Ambassador Hotel (infamously where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated).
Sadly, the city and the state that nurtured my grandfather no longer exist. The orange groves have long been paved over, replacing citrus with a concrete jungle of strip malls. The landmark theaters are shuttered, and the homeless (many mentally ill) openly engage in drug deals in front of their doors. The Ambassador Hotel has turned into a fully public school after a contentious battle to have a charter school occupy part of the site. Of the culture-defining institutions of his youth, Hollywood has become infiltrated by left-wing anti-white identitarianism and racial quotas, while Disneyland has become too expensive for the now shrinking middle class it was built for.
When one thinks of Californian exports, one no longer thinks about airplanes or oil, but about people and companies moving elsewhere. As the January 2025 fires proved, California, and Los Angeles in particular, is no longer a land of opportunity, but of misgovernance, economic contraction, overregulation, and even worse traffic (the last being my grandfather’s most vociferous complaint). Even the place where my family had its origins in California and where my grandfather will be laid to rest—Inglewood Park Cemetery—is struggling to meet the demands of a water rate increase that will reach almost 50 percent in less than a year.
It is hard to see how California can recover its stature within the United States. The Sunshine State is no longer known for its scenery or industry, but for its “poop maps.” Old industries, such as refineries, continue to close while new ones, such as Tesla, move to other states. The state continues to witness a population exodus, losing 700,000 people during the Covid pandemic alone. While specific issues, like crime or homelessness, have improved since 2020, these improvements have simply followed national trends.
Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the ever-growing Californian diaspora seems to be leading the nation, much as their former state used to. In public policy alone, former Californians, such as Jeremy Carl or Ryan Williams as Claremont, have done more to highlight critical yet oft-neglected domestic issues for the American right. Regardless of the future of the state itself, its diaspora is working tirelessly to keep what made it special alive.
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