Cultural Forces of the Silicon Valley: A History
The following was a research prospectus developed in (high school) junior year history seminar, 1968: A World on the Verge. Viewable on Google Docs.
The region now referred to as the Silicon Valley has become a major economic driving force within the Western United States. It is home to technical startups and large tech companies which were once in their place, whose workers propel a fast-paced ecosystem allowing for the region to be considered the nineteenth largest economy. However, it was only a century ago when the entire region consisted of agricultural land and an identity it shared with other western states as being “colonized” by powerful institutions located on the East Coast. It was this “underdevelopment” of the Western United States which allowed for the creation of a new industrialized West, put forward by visionaries who felt pressured to act due to western states’ collective identity, by immigrant workers who joined forces to fight toxic working conditions, and by farmers who opposed the rapid industrialization and supported the preservation of fertile agricultural lands which they owned. While all of these cultural influences played a defining role in the creation of Silicon Valley, the ecosystem was largely a product of its time — rushing to meet the demands of both the West Coast and the country as a whole during the Great Depression, Second World War, and the Cold War.
Prior to the Second World War, the Santa Clara Valley was referred to as “The Valley of the Heart’s Delight” and, briefly, the cannery capital of the world. The region was filled with miles and miles of orchards and cannery facilities, connected by a network of “main-street towns” and local railroads. Most of the produce grown in the region were sold locally along railroad tracks or in larger hubs such as San Jose and San Francisco. In comparison to the East Coast, the West Coast was largely undeveloped (with notable exceptions such as the City of San Francisco).
As recent as the twentieth century, the economic and cultural hubs of the United States were located along the East Coast. (This is a result of the establishment of the nation having happened along the East Coast.) With continuous stronger economic and cultural ties to European markets, Europeans were often the faces featured in all forms of media (while Mexicans and Asians, who were geographically closer to the West Coast, were not prominently featured in American media). The nation’s expansion into the “wild west” had the purpose of bringing wealth back to the East — pioneers traveled to California to test their luck in the gold fields, and both the shipping lines between San Francisco & East Coast cities and the Transcontinental Railroad were built to be able to take resources (such as gold) and deliver them back to the influential institutions (universities, businesses, and manufacturers) along the prosperous East Coast. While the West was being integrated into the economy of the east, the societal concerns of its people seemed irrelevant to people in the east; the region was not very present in America’s north-south political divide. The Western states shared a collective identity, one where its residents saw their lands as being “colonized” by the east.
As Herbert Hoover, an early board member for Stanford University and later President of the United States put it, “Several hundred California youths are in attendance at eastern universities. The demand for these men in the East upon graduation is far in excess of the supply and California is losing many good brains”. Administrators in Stanford’s early years wanted to challenge this by creating a university located in the West to help propel growth in the region. In the 1920s, Hoover established the university’s Graduate School of Business with the mission of driving development in the West: “Its problems differ from all other parts of the country; it needs men trained for entry into the business world in its own setting”. When the President of Stanford University at the time, President John Casper Branner, recommended that a professor from Princeton University should be named its next president, many responded negatively, with Hoover calling the man a “some loudmouthed Princetown professor [who was] sycophant to [the] Wall Street bunch”. In addition, Hoover wrote to the board of trustees that this university was “essentially a Western institution, with ideals entirely different from those which obtain on the Atlantic seaboard”, continuing on, maintaining that “nothing would be more disastrous than to choose some classical Professor from the East”. This course of events reaffirmed many Stanford faculty members’ beliefs in countering the bureaucracy and large institutions of Wall Street and the liberal arts-focused institutions in the East by delivering a “practical” education, enabling students to build new companies or products in the West.
Although the realm of academia and the realm of civic engagement were kept separate at the time, Stanford University chose to work with the federal government to support government projects and the establishments of new companies and industrial parks. This was largely in line with the vision of Frederick Terman, a Palo Alto native who had come back to grow and profess under the university’s electrical engineering department. Terman wanted to create a community of technical scholars: “such a community is composed of industries using highly sophisticated technologies, together with a strong university that is sensitive to the creative activities of the surrounding industry. This pattern appears to be the wave of the future.” The heavy involvement of the university and the federal government were largely accepted due to the cultural identity of the Western United States and the conditions that came with the Great Depression and World War II. In the 1920’s, residents encouraged the creation of industry that could compete with the East; in the 1930’s, government run-programs under The New Deal gained popularity (involved in many aspects of people’s livelihoods) was supported for the economic growth and improved societal conditions it created across the United States; and in the 1940’s, manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay helped to meet the demand of the war efforts while moving production lines closer to the Pacific Theatre. In addition, many feared a post-war economic collapse if industry was not continuously developed.
With the end of the Second World War came not a collapse, but a post-war boom, with an influx of new residents including veterans looking for new homes and engineers which came with the new industries which also moved in. According to Rebecca Conard in Green Gold: 1950s Greenbelt Planning in Santa Clara County, California, “a combination of factors attracted industry to the valley after World War II: federally sponsored research in electronics; national defense imperatives of the Cold War; nearby urban markets; abundant inexpensive land available for large plant operations; and cities and developers willing to underwrite the cost of infrastructures”. Many companies in the region were able to create top-quality products and supply for the military’s demands by specializing in a specific field, such as the missile (defense), satellite, space electronics, microwave electronics, and semiconductor industries. As reported in Thomas Heinrich’s Cold War Armory: Military Contracting in Silicon Valley, “Santa Clara County produced all of the United States Navy’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, the bulk of its reconnaissance satellites and tracking systems, and a wide range of microelectronics that became integral components of high-tech weapons and weapons systems”. Demand for goods under government contracts continued to increase well into the 1980’s, when “ Santa Clara County netted almost $5 billion annually in military contracts”; that companies who manufactured for the government had little fear of going out of business, were able to spend decades refining their skill creating highly sophisticated, high-tech products best for the government’s needs, and were always in a hustle to create more of the same goods.
Although the rapid output of highly sophisticated technical products could support engineers and entrepreneurs in turning their ideas into a product, it often restricted companies’ abilities to create products serving consumer markets, which Silicon Valley is known for today. This is evident in this Office of Technology Assessment Report by the United States Congress, from the Cold War Era: “In designing the equipment [for the government], the main emphasis is on technical performance and meeting DOD (Department of Defense) requirements….Many firms or divisions of companies, that learn to work with DOD’s demands for high technical performance, to meet confining and sometimes outmoded military specifications, and to live with detailed supervision, simply restrict most of their business to defense”. However, as competing technical manufacturers began to arise in East Asia, and as the Cold War and military demands from the valley cooled down, more and more manufacturers shifted their attention towards business-to-business sales, and eventually business-to-consumer sales, largely due to advancements in computing (; it would take some time before computers would become compact and intuitive enough for the common person for business-to-consumer sales to even be considered).
Although Professor Frederick Terman of Stanford University once reported that “the West has long dreamed of an indigenous industry of sufficient magnitude to balance its agricultural resources”, the attractiveness of the Santa Clara Valley to engineers, manufacturers, and the federal government (for its projects with the US military and NASA) created a heavy imbalance of manufacturing jobs and industry when compared to agriculture. In the 1950’s, the total increase in population in the Silicon Valley was at 121.1%, and the new immigration rate stayed in the 70 percent range into the 1970's.
This rapid rise in population was not welcomed by many existing residents, especially farmers who were losing their land. From the start of the Santa Clara Valley’s rapid urbanization in the 1940’s, many existing residents opposed the rapid growth, working in local government, creating research reports, and founding their own organizations in an effort to save farmers’ lands. By the early 1950’s, what were once small towns in the western portion of Santa Clara County became cities which rushed to annex pieces of land surrounding them. This pace, however, was not replicated by the local government, and “the reins of county government remained in the hands of a decreasing rural population. Figures compiled in 1958 reveal that three of the five supervisorial districts [in the county] contained only 24% of the county’s population”. This created massive conflicts between the city governments wishing to annex more land, and the county government who often blocked these annexations from moving forward. Many farmers appealed to the county in an attempt to protect their land. In one attempt, fifteen pear growers in Agnew — just north of the Santa Clara border at the time — worked with a county planning commissioner, county planning director, and the county zoning administrator, to create an exclusive agricultural zone around their orchards.
Planning commissioners continued to establish exclusive agricultural zoning and proposed for the preservation of open space not seen in the rest of the country. Green Gold, a publication by the county’s planning department, called on federal and state governments to create “permanent agricultural reserves” to protect “priceless resources” from “urban scatterization”. Many advocates for “rural preservation” went further, pushing for greenbelts which they argued would preserve both agricultural land and the identities of cities (as cities would remain separated by the preserved land). While most of these efforts were largely unsuccessful, the agriculture industry remained a powerful lobby; their focus shifted to preserving the southern part of the county as agricultural land (which proved successful), and talks that had started with the intention of stopping urban growth ended up with the passage of legislation such as the Williamson Act and 1966 Property Tax Assessment Reform Act, which provided preferential taxation to farm owners. While the industries that populated the valley moved on, the labor movement that existed in the region remained significant.
Since the late nineteenth century, workers — largely consisting of immigrant populations from Mexico and Asia — were given little freedom from their workplace, resulting in workers of all different racial backgrounds coming together and advocating for improved working conditions and higher pay. For cannery workers, there was the Toilers of the World, organized by a larger organization known as The Industrial Workers of the World. As described by David Bacon in Social Justice Unions Claim Deep Roots in Silicon Valley, “the IWW became the first in a line of left-wing unions that would practice radical, inclusive, worker-to-worker organizing in the Valley, linking workers’ rights and immigrants’ and workers’ and community struggles”. Farmworkers and cannery workers held gatherings and strikes in order to demand better treatment, higher wages, and to work against restrictions separating the roles of men and women. Some of these organizations included the United Cannery and Agricultural and Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), United Farm Workers (formed by the smaller Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and National Farm Worker Association), and the Cannery Workers Committee (CWC). While these organizations were able to bring immigrant groups together and push for better working conditions, few changes were made once farming and cannery moved out of the Silicon Valley — to place themselves along the new California Aqueduct, and to avoid giving in to higher labor costs they would have to endure to meet the demands of Santa Clara County-based workers.
Workers in the region have always faced heavy restrictions upon their ability to organize, and the division of roles based on race and gender was also omnipresent. On the farm and inside canneries, immigrants were typically given more intense, laborious work, with roles designated separately for men and women. In Patricia Zavella’s book, “Women’s Work and Chicano Families”, the restrictions put on Chicano women in Santa Clara Valley canneries is detailed: “these factors included job labeling, in which certain jobs were considered ‘men’s’ or ‘women’s’ work; mechanization; distinctions in the collective bargaining agreements between ‘seasonal’ and ‘regular’ workers; the need for ‘men’s’ job skills to qualify for high paying jobs; the operation of work-based networks; and sexual harassment by the male workers”. Dorothy Healey, was a strike organizer in the 1930’s who protested against these conditions. She reported, “we could not rent a single hall in San Jose. There was nothing that was legal, where people could gather together…So we would hold these street meetings…, and the police would break them up”.
Restrictions remained on workers’ ability to organize with the rise of manufacturing and the founding of the modern tech industry. In addition, feelings of racial inferiority of African Americans were largely present in the region, supported by many prior members of the Stanford administration, including its first President and the father of Frederick Terman. These ideals were continued with many Caucasian executives such as William Shockley (the creator of the region’s first major semiconductor) dividing the roles of his workers based on race. “It was very hard organizing a union in those plants, because the feeling of powerlessness among the workers was so difficult to overcome…It seems obvious that there has to be a long-term effort and commitment, with a movement among workers in the industry as a whole, and in the communities in which they live”, said Amy Newell, who created an organizing committee at Siliconix. On top of this, the co-founder of Intel Corporation remarked, “remaining non-union is an essential for survival for most of our companies…The great hope for our nation is to avoid those deep, deep divisions between workers and management”. (Thus, it should not come as a surprise that many workers today in large tech companies are non-unionized, and Google’s first union was formed this year, twenty-three years after the formation of the company.) Even with barriers put in place, however, the pressures from factory work were too great for the workers to not demand better conditions. Through organizations such as the UE Electronics Organizing Committee, workers were able to collectively push for pay raises and safer conditions in manufacturing hubs, while bringing public awareness to the “toxic working conditions” of “clean industry” and increasing membership through publications in multiple languages. Although some manufacturers replicated the activity of farms it displaced by moving its factories to locations with lower labor costs and worker demands, the efforts of immigrant workers did result in safer working conditions within the Silicon Valley, and contracts for “low-skill workers” such as janitors or assembly line workers.
Since the 1980’s, the access to information created by innovation in the tech industry and changing public perception towards embracing diversity and inclusion of immigrant voices in the workplace, has largely countered the decades of support for the arguments of racial superiority and inferiority in the region. Changes we can see on the ground level, such as the removal of the names of eugenics supporters David Starr Jordan and Frederick Terman from Palo Alto schools as recent as 2018, speaks to the changing ideals of the region. In addition, the creation of channels where it is possible to send information to the other side of the world has enabled technological progress, and along with it, the inability of union workers to stay separated due to geographic boundaries. From the 1980’s to today, not only the entire nation, but the entire world, is using technological tools enhancing our daily lives due to the work of mistreated workers and visionaries who ended up making the East Coast turn to the West for innovation and culture.
However, this analysis of the cultural forces which created the Silicon Valley we know today is far from complete. Getting a greater understanding of this history requires a more in-depth look into the roles of specific unions and organizations present in the region, and primary source records from workers’ themselves. Understanding the role of the cultural forces pushing the West to be able to with the east, the scientific community established with the help of Stanford University and the federal government, and the immigrant workers who pivoted from working farms, to canneries, and to factories, allows us to gain a greater comprehension of what is (arguably) the most important technological hub in the Information Age.
Sources
Conard, Rebecca. “Green Gold: 1950s Greenbelt Planning in Santa Clara County, California.” Environmental Review: ER 9, no. 1 (1985): 5–18. Accessed May 18, 2021. doi:10.2307/3984112.
ADAMS, STEPHEN B. “Regionalism in Stanford’s Contribution to the Rise of Silicon Valley.” Enterprise & Society 4, no. 3 (2003): 521–43. Accessed May 18, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23700412.
SAXENIAN, ANNALEE. “The Genesis of Silicon Valley.” Built Environment (1978-) 9, no. 1 (1983): 7–17. Accessed May 18, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23286110.
HEINRICH, THOMAS. “Cold War Armory: Military Contracting in Silicon Valley.” Enterprise & Society 3, no. 2 (2002): 247–84. Accessed May 18, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23699688.
Bacon, David. “Social Justice Unions Claim Deep Roots in Silicon Valley.” Race, Poverty & the Environment 20, no. 2 (2015): 125–30. Accessed May 15, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43873247.
Zavella, Patricia. “Conclusion.” In Women’s Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley, 167–71. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1987. Accessed May 15, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1wn0qrh.10.
