Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate; the people are educated, rich, healthy, innovative. Remnants of a hippie counterculture synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley. In some circles the small city—population near 70,000, as of this writing—has acquired the mythical reputation of a postmodern El Dorado, where money flows by the billions from the investors on Sand Hill Road to hundreds of garages where scrappy coders are changing the way we do everything, from driving around to eating food. On per-capita terms, the Valley ranks with the planet’s wealthiest spots: Qatar, Macao, Luxembourg. A few people seem convinced that Palo Alto is in fact the center of the world.

Leland and Jane Lathrop Stanford gave the town its reason to be and its name, but they weren’t the first to colonize the area and they didn’t invent the words palo alto, which mean “tall tree” in Spanish and refer to a particular specimen. El Palo Alto is a sequoia that got its name from a governor of California—or, rather, the Californias. The Spanish expedition of Gaspar de Portolá was the first European group to reach the San Francisco Bay area, and many of the names they assigned to the natural features remain. (A quarter-millennium or so later, nearby Portola Valley is the richest town per capita in the richest country in the world.) For five days in November of 1769, the expedition camped under a towering tree near what is now San Francisquito Creek. El Palo Alto, now over one thousand years old, still stands, a straight mile shot from Palo Alto High School, right down the train tracks.

Today’s settlers find the schools a bigger draw than the foliage. For parents hoping to give their children the best chance at a successful life, the Palo Alto Unified School District is choice. In a society where skills and education are supposed to make the difference, it’s hard to make a better tuition-free bet than PAUSD. Even more than the hot job market and the Silicon Valley stock options, the school system is what has driven the median home price up near $3 million at the time of this writing.

I was born in Santa Cruz, California, but my mother and father met in Palo Alto, as a research assistant and a temp typist respectively. They moved our family back to town in 1996, and I spent the second half of my childhood on quiet culs-de-sac in the very nice place. My life felt traditionally United States suburban, a lot like what I saw on TV. But every now and then something else shone through the figurative fence posts at the edge of town. There were signs that, if Palo Alto was normal, it was too normal, weirdly normal.

I attended Ohlone Elementary—named for what we were told was the tribe that used to live on the Peninsula—and one day in fourth grade we had a substitute teacher. Most of the adults in my life were pretty stable as far as I could tell; I wasn’t used to their behaving unpredictably. Maybe that’s why I was so spooked that day when, instead of following the regularly scheduled curriculum, the substitute sat us down on the carpet and tried to tell us something important. “You live in a bubble,” she said, her voice strained and urgent. “The rest of the world isn’t like this. Do you know that?” Two dozen wide-eyed children looked back at her. We did not know that.

I don’t recall a lot of specific days from that age, but this one stuck with me. Apparently some of my classmates told their parents about the unscheduled bubble lecture because when he returned, our regular teacher apologized to us for what happened and reassured us that the bad substitute wouldn’t be back, that the district had blacklisted her. If that was supposed to make us disregard what we heard, it had the opposite effect on me.

As I grew up, Palo Alto gradually offered its own explanation for why things were the way they were—why some people had big houses and others didn’t, why some people lived here and everyone else didn’t: They deserved it. Hard work and talent allowed some people to change the world single-handedly, and they earned whatever they got. Sometimes this message was literally written on the walls—like the stories about Hewlett and Packard in the Stanford engineering building, printed on a permanent informational display near a water fountain I frequented as a teenager—but it was also the town’s implicit underlying ideology from its founding. We all got the message.

The suicides started in 2002. That year, a Palo Alto High freshman stepped in front of the Caltrain, the same locomotive line on which Leland Stanford built the town. Thirteen months later, one of his classmates ended his life the same way. Both picked the Churchill Avenue crossing, right near the school. In 2009, four more students between the ages of thirteen and seventeen killed themselves at the Meadow Drive crossing near their school, Gunn High. Another string of Palo Alto teenagers died by train in 2014 and 2015. These deaths were well publicized, particularly as a social-scientific example of the rare “double cluster” of suicidality, as if it were an unusual astrological phenomenon. The Atlantic magazine ran a cover story on the “Silicon Valley Suicides,” and no investigation of self-destructive teens was complete without a reference to Palo Alto.¹ One thing the coverage missed was that the official tally undercounts the victims by at least half because it excludes young people who killed themselves after graduation, even when they returned to the tracks to do it. The community experienced not two clusters but a constant flow of tragic deaths in the twenty-first century. It continues: a month before I finished this manuscript, a twenty-two-year-old Gunn High graduate ended his life on the tracks.

As kids, when we talked about the place where we lived, my brother, sister, and I used to make morbid jokes about Sunnydale, the fictional California setting for the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where perfect weather conceals the portal to hell under the high school. As I got older, I began to think of the idea earnestly. We have a word for idyllic towns where the youth suicide rate is three times as high as it’s supposed to be: haunted. Palo Alto is haunted.

When I say haunted, I don’t mean haunted in the ghost sense, not exactly, or at least not necessarily. We use the word all the time without referring to actual phantoms. We can be haunted by a loss or a traumatic event or even by that dumb thing we said that one time. Haunting happens when a past action won’t go away, won’t stay past. But the word usually refers to a relation between the living and the dead: There’s an imbalance between the realms, something stuck where it isn’t supposed to be. Haunting is homologous with theft, which also involves things being where they shouldn’t, but we’re not talking about a stolen wallet; it takes more than that to disturb hell. What haunts are the kinds of large historical crimes that, once committed, can never truly be set right.

The simplest imbalance between the living and the dead is just that: We’re still here and they’re not. When it comes to my classmates, the division feels arbitrary. Some of those who died were depressive, some weren’t—a description of the living as well. Anything you could say about them you could say about us, too, except the one. That has haunted me, and I have struggled to find a way to approach it as a writer. There is a whole pile of journalistic investigations of the Palo Alto suicides, as well as a long Centers for Disease Control report, and I’ve found them uniformly unsatisfying in a way that suggests a problem with the medium rather than the reporters. I have no interest in writing a suburban California survival memoir, either, and I write about myself like a bad bowler anyway, always headed straight for the gutters of historical context rather than for the pins of personal revelation.

One thing I learned about in Palo Alto was C. Wright Mills’s concept of the sociological imagination, which he describes as a tool people can use to “understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society.”² Much like the sociological imagination, a haunting pulls together biography and history on the social field. Haunting connects the haunted to unseen lineages of historical responsibility. The cursed painting looted in the Holocaust, the construction project that disturbs an Indian burial ground, the pollution that awakens a swamp monster: These are social crimes from which some suffer and others profit. Hauntings are a reversal: The profiteers are made to suffer. At its best, superstition reminds us not to take advantage of others, even if nobody will ever see us doing it. The violations are embedded, written in the world. Something knows. But the revenge targeting is rarely quick or exact, and in our haunting narratives, when a curse comes alive, it’s often those nearest to the loot who end up paying. It’s the inheritors, the unsuspecting couple who buys an old house, or the violator’s descendants, the children, those who were meant to cleanse the ill-gotten fortune with their innocence and carry it into the future, their naiveté an element of the crime.

“The children of California shall be our children,” Leland Stanford told his wife, Jane, when they decided to build Palo Alto. It’s a grandiose claim, but as applied to me it’s not as inaccurate as I’d prefer. History doesn’t stay put: It works itself under your skin in fragments like shrapnel; it steals into your bloodstream like an infection. I’m a product of my environment, and I’m shot through with its symptoms. If that experience is to be useful rather than obfuscating, then it’s as a place to start, a set of intersections between biography and history.

With some sociological imagination, in the following five sections I’m going to focus my attention back up the historical tracks, the line that happened into what Mills would call my biography and spun my particular life into being. I’m not a character worth naming in that history, and the reader will be spared my childhood recollections from here on. Rather, I understand myself as a result of something the town founders called the Palo Alto System. It’s that haunted system I pull apart in this book, a system that has become centrally important to the present era no matter where you look.

Palo Alto is a bubble. I do know that now, but it’s an important bubble for the twentieth century, and a thorough accounting of the town’s role explains a lot about California, the United States, and the capitalist world, where it has found itself elevated to the status of promised land. That story fills the following pages.