Bookmarked: “Palo Alto,” I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down

Earlier this summer, I took a trip to Stanford University with a close friend of mine. It’s an easy 45-minute drive and a reasonably pleasant day trip from where I grew up in Morgan Hill, California to Palo Alto — Stanford’s home. 

It’s hard to describe how beautiful the campus is, with its sprawling lawns and stucco buildings. Nobody moved too fast, nobody talked too fast; it was all peaceful laze and beautiful listlessness.

Walking around the campus felt like touring the mind palace of a Stepford wife, each new building more stunningly picturesque than the last. As we walked, the names adorning each center or institute came into view as if out of a thick fog. 

Hewlett. Hoover. Packard. Hoover a second, third and fourth time. 

These red-blooded Stanford men, among countless others, have come to define our modern conception of the world as we know it — decidedly for the worse. 

In his book “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World,” author Malcolm Harris uses the deceptive allure of Stanford University to tell the wider history of Palo Alto, the Bay Area and as promised, the world.

Harris begins with the brutal genocide and enslavement of the Muwékma Ohlone, the tribe that lays historical claim to much of the land in the South Bay Area. He outlines the treatment of the Ohlone by Spanish missionaries and the horrific mission system that incited centuries of vicious exploitation.

Moving chronologically, Harris tracks through the history of the Gold Rush and the incorporation of the first beating heart of the Bay — San Francisco. From there, history progresses down the valley to the rise of robber baron Leland Stanford and the eventual inception of Leland Stanford Junior University.

Stanford University binds together the narrative Harris spins. It’s the jumping-off point for the presidency and legacy of notorious alum Herbert Hoover and later discussion of his various ideological offshoots, from Reagan administration Secretary of State George Shultz in the Hoover Institution think tank to billionaire and Stanford graduate Peter Thiel.

So much is covered in the 628 pages of “Palo Alto” that it would be near impossible to outline each wind and bend in Harris’ book. Such a long walk through California’s sordid history — the expulsion of the Ohlone and other tribes throughout the state, vicious anti-Chinese sentiment during the Gold Rush and 20th-century centers of conservative power and influence, leads the Golden State to lose much of its illustrious sheen. One could argue, however, that was very much Harris’s point. 

It’s difficult to read historical accounts of what seem to be very contemporary issues to the modern reader. It’s strange and deeply unsettling to realize, to use a topical quote from Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, that “you live in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” 

From that difficulty arises a pervasive, acidic hopelessness — a nagging thought that some ideas are simply too entrenched in national and international politics to ever be fully extracted. There is no recourse, no atonement, no hope.

History has a way of repeating when we find ourselves unaware of its consequences.

In May, campus police units violently swarmed pro-Palestinian student protestors at universities across the nation, mirroring institutional responses to 1969 anti-Vietnam protests. Stanford, alongside many of its academic contemporaries, reminded students and the public it learned all the wrong lessons from 1969.

The Hoover Institution’s particular brand of conservatism, while in a sense the forefather of Trumpian populism, finds itself a strange bedfellow to the new conservative current. And yet, quite a few of the institutions backing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 have deep ties to the Institution. 

After all, MAGA-adjacent politicians are just saying out loud what the Hoover Institution tended to obliquely imply. 

The events of “Palo Alto” and the writing’s almost prophetic quality feel too close to home — both literally and figuratively. Wherever you turn the page, in the book and in our waking lives, there is a strongman and his Stanford graduate lackeys waiting to star in a tale of exploitation and general skullduggery.

What further compels me about “Palo Alto” is the particular historical track Harris takes in the middle section of the book. He elects to guide the reader through a history of Communist and left-wing organizing in the Bay Area and California at large. 

He pays special attention to student radicalism and protests at Bay Area colleges throughout the sixties and seventies, especially at Stanford and San Francisco State University. Harris creates a broader timeline of Bay Area activism, starting with the inception of the Black Panthers in Oakland and ending with Stanford student radicalism in the years following the slow end of the Vietnam War.

Harris argues the history of Palo Alto and its swirling milieu of right-wing Hooverites and Silicon Valley autocratic acolytes is the history of the world. These men and women have placed their blood-soaked hands in as many pies as they can, and their passing whims have become our fates.

The end of “Palo Alto,” for all its pages of greed and unabashed evil, does retain a semblance of hope. This hope contrasted deeply with the resignation I’d developed by the end of the book, shocking me out of what I now recognize to be a selfish, myopic pattern of thinking. 

Building on the work of Indigenous scholars Glen Coulthard and Renya Ramirez, Harris argues in the final chapter the best first step toward undoing the years of damage caused by C-suites, politicians and bad actors is giving the land on which Stanford stands back to the Muwékma Ohlone. Not just land acknowledgments, not just nominal recognition, but to truly withdraw from what we now understand as Palo Alto.

It is rightfully theirs, after all. 

“Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World,” by Malcolm Harris, is available in bookstores and online now.