Opinion: The old heave-ho in the old O.C.

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With one gesture, Orange County has reminded the rest of California of the kind of place it used to be -- and perhaps the kind of place it still is, in places, if you scratch away some of the gold leaf. That gesture was the about-face decision that reneged on an agreement to hire a prominent liberal legal scholar to head UC Irvine’s new law school.

The past that Orange County has worked so assiduously to put behind it comes up again: the Orange County that is not the high-tech center with high-priced homes and high-performing schools, but that other Orange County, the prickly, politically retrograde one, politically insular, homogeneous and parochial.

In that Orange County, the Ku Klux Klan ran the Anaheim city council for a time in the 1920s -- and in the 1980s, a Republican candidate hired uniformed security guards to stand outside polling places in Latino neighborhoods with placards reading ‘Non-Citizens Can’t Vote.’ In that Orange County, conservative land barons and magnates held sway well into the 20th century, men with names like Irvine and Segerstrom and Knott and Karcher.

In that Orange County, the John Birch Society flourished, and sent men to Congress – men like James Utt, who voted against civil rights acts and claimed that ‘a large contingent of barefooted Africans’ might be training in Georgia under UN auspices to take over the United States. Utt was succeeded in Congress by John Schmitz, who reportedly joked that he had joined the Society to try to get Orange County’s moderate vote. He speechified about Orange County as the ‘focal point of Western civilization,’ about ‘bulldykes,’ he bought Joseph McCarthy’s old home, and said that President Richard Nixon, after his historic foray to China, that he needn’t bother coming back. [Schmitz also had two children by a secret mistress, and his daughter, teacher Mary Kay LeTourneau, was prosecuted for having sex with her young student.] That Orange County didn’t serve red wine in its new performing arts center, lest patrons spill it on the white carpet. Heck, Santa Ana was once a ‘dry’ town altogether. Orange County has embraced planned communities so fervently that architectural historian and critic Robert Winter said the place looks ‘like dentures’; in Orange County, CCR doesn’t stand for Credence Clearwater Revival, but for ‘conditions, covenants and restrictions’ on everything from paint colors and basketball hoops to fences, landscaping, and lighting.

Orange County is where conservative immigrants made their home: the Vietnamese, fleeing their own country in 1975, soon moved up the freeway a few miles from their Camp Pendleton arrival point, and became the staunchest anti-Communists in Orange County, which is saying something.

Orange County has, without irony, ripped up virtually all its agricultural acreage and planted housing tracts and shopping malls; across from one of the most prosperous is a sculpture garden with Isamu Noguchi works including an homage to the vanished OC, ‘The Spirit of the Lima Bean.’

Orange County is the engine and the checkbook of Republican politics in California, and one of its foremost check-writers has been Donald Bren, who now heads the Irvine Co. He donated $20 million to pay for the salaries of a dean and eleven professors at a new UC Irvine law school. And now the man hired to be dean of that school, Erwin Chemerinsky, has been told to unpack and stay at his old job; his services won’t be needed in Orange County. Conservative scholars have leaped to speak up for Chemerinsky, his intellect and his character, and though they may deplore his liberalism, they deplore even more the decision to yank the job out from under him. One, Douglas Kmiec, said the about-face is ‘a betrayal of everything a law school should stand for.’

So ... old OC.