On Palo Alto
Created: 2024-01-06 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-15 (20:17:16)Status: completed
“Maybe we’re more like butterflies, pinned live and wriggling onto history’s collage.”
A history of Palo Alto and Stanford University, as both microcosm of and gravitational centre for capitalist exploitation. Malcolm Harris moves through two hundred years of colonisation in the western United States, the foundation of Palo Alto originally as a horse-breeding estate for railroad baron Leland Stanford, and its development through his namesake university into a viral reservoir for white supremacy, eugenics, the growth of the military-industrial complex and the inception of neoliberal economics.
Harris focuses on individuals connected with Palo Alto, but as the quote above suggests, this is not in the form of ‘great man’ history. The books treats capitalism as an impersonal force that makes use of the individuals available to it. If it were not Leland Stanford or Frederick Terman or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, Harris uggests, capitalist forces would have made use of someone else who happened to be in the right place at the right time. If anything the book goes out of its way to portray the Californian movers and shakers of the twentieth century as more-or-less lucky mediocrities.
Against these figures the book continually unearths others, forces of resistance “who find ways to tug back, who pit themselves against the way things are and come to personify the system’s self-destructive countertendencies.” Against railroads and cartels, corporations and the military, Harris highlights activists, revolutionaries and unionists. In this vein the book concludes with an account of the indigenous Ohlone peoples’ fight for recognition and the call for Stanford to cede its eight-thousand acres of land in Palo Alto.
References
- Harris, Malcolm, 2023, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Little, Brown and Company
Endmatter
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